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H
ow do you design an Olympic stadium when you don’t yet know its future tenant, or even the main sports that will go inside it?
That was one of the main quandaries facing architects
Populous, awarded the task of designing the centrepiece for the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, taking place this summer. For Populous architect Philip Johnson, there was also the not insignificant matter of creating a space in which the opening and closing ceremonies will take place, likely to be a spectacular design by Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle and representing an outlay of perhaps £100 million. “The building has been designed to allow aerial acrobatics, so
it has places where you can rig things from,” says Johnson. “The idea is to create the theatrical experience. That’s one of the things that makes the building so interesting – that it is both sport and an enormous event.”
But perhaps the most important design driver was the way in
which Populous had to create a building that’s able to stage a temporary, one-off event, and then segue seamlessly into a new ‘legacy’ future. To be both a fitting, efficient, safe and stylish cen- trepiece of a once-in-a-generation happening, but also a lasting venue for its unknown tenant and the surrounding community. The £486 million stadium will have 80,000 seats during
Games-time, 25,000 afterwards; something that has never been done before and requires careful design to maximise the visitor experience in each configuration. Happily, the site at the south of the Olympic Park has helped this design process. One of the best things about the site, says Johnson, is the fact that it is bounded by the River Lea and City Mill Rivers on two sides and the Greenway footpath and cycleway on the third, slicing it into a triangle of land the designers branded ‘stadium island’. This allowed the designers to treat that whole island as the ‘venue’, so
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