094 OLYMPICS
HISTORY BEGINS where memory leaves off. It’s been over a decade since Danny Boyle’s spectacular opening ceremony for the London Olympic Games kick-started an unforgettable summer – one magical fortnight, our recollections of that golden time still vivid, the pessimists proved wrong for once, sceptics and doom-mongers defied. Some of those memories will always be indelible; memories fade, buildings remain, the rest is history. Olympic cities enter an alternative world, one where barriers are set up, entire streets are deleted from the map, and traffic speaks in quarter inches. Tey are different. Only VIP cars speed where once you cycled carelessly to work. Finding one’s way through those reorganised streets? By comparison, finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s play. After 2012’s parade of wonders we were with Prospero reassuring the audience:
GRAND PARIS Dominique Perrault Architecte
REFLECTING ON METROPOLIS
Our revels now are ended. Tese our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, Te cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
Te solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on…
And now that run of Olympic Games, when one British gold medal followed another in seamless style, appears to be at an end: in Dickens’ phrase ‘it was an epoch of belief, it was an epoch of incredulity’.
ATHLETES’ VILLAGE PARIS 2024
CITÉ DE L’ARCHITECTURE ET DU PATRIMOINE
METRO! EXHBITION
VILLEJUIF GUSTAVE ROUSSY STATION
In 2012, London’s sporting facilities were transformed, for better or worse, with a series of new and temporary structures – some wonderful, some tacky. When it was all over an athletes’ village was transformed into a Qatari-owned gated series of luxury flats in a grand development site in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Te village itself was sold to the Qatari ruling family’s property company in 2011 in a deal that left UK taxpayers £275m out of pocket. Te Olympic Development Authority was simply looking for the highest bidder – it was not interested in breaking the planning mould. Inside the gated private apartment blocks the edges of their architect’s egos frayed into the wider fabric of urban indifference. Plus, almost inevitably, the whole development was anchored by a vast retail and leisure complex, at the time the largest urban shopping centre in Europe, that you had to walk through in order to get to the Olympics. Opened in 2011 at a time of retail gloom, the developers originally pinned their hopes for the immodestly named 177,000m2 Westfield Stratford City in part on euro- tourists arriving by train – people who
stopped arriving once Stratford International station was no longer ‘international’ right after the Games were over. Aside from the ‘city’ of the developer’s fantasies (a sense underscored by the fact that its postcode is E20, until then existing only in television’s EastEnders), the challenge for the complex – and the city-changing powers it claimed for itself – was always going to be a year after its opening, when the crowds had peeled away and it became just another shopping centre. Uplifting or a vision of hell, this work of corporate gigantism nevertheless survived and prospered and was an Olympian success story. Some 51 million visitors passed through Westfield Stratford City’s doors last year. Most surprising of all, it has not killed off the more everyday shopping centre in the middle of Stratford.
Everything about London 2012 was very expensive, especially the swimming pool – much praised but ludicrously over-budget. Te stadium was remade for a football club at
DOMINIQUE PERRAULT ARCHITECTE
KMSP PARIS 2024
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