The Olympic Delivery Authority is the latest in a long list of agencies upon whose fate London depends. Large-scale statist plans such as the Greater London Development Plan of the 1960s died when important components were defeated by local opposition. Free-enterprise models such as the London Dockland Development Corporation took over from local authorities and spent £1.8 billion (€2.2 billion) of public money. The corporation was given exceptional land-acquisition and planning-control powers. The effect on the city, however, was to create a privatized enclave while providing only limited benefits. Housing, education and health remained firmly in the hands of the local authorities.
The Olympics are often seen as being a cause of the problems facing London, when in fact they provide a (very limited) means of addressing the housing shortage and the overall obstacles to project implementation. The Olympic Park occupies a well-defined area of the formerly industrial land at the southern base of the Lea Valley Regional Park, a thin sliver of parkland 26 miles long that enters London in the north-east and plunges down towards the Thames. The park was secured in parliamentary legislation in the early 1960s, as a “playground for Londoners against the background of London. This background – power stations, gas works, factories, railways, houses and flats – must be accepted and acknowledged in the landscape theme.” This heroic note of futurism in the plan of a public park has shaped the area ever since.
Opposite the stadium is the Pudding Mill Lane Pumping Station, built to pump sewage from the stadium and the rest of the site into the Northern Outfall Sewer, which runs along the site’s perimeter. Like the concrete shaft it houses, the pumping station, designed by John Lyall Architects, is circular in cross section; its internal area measures 92 square metres. The shaft, which is inserted 15 metres into the ground, contains the dry and wet wells of the pumping station. The above-ground structure, which houses the odour-control equipment, is extrapolated from the precast concrete rings used to create the well. Lyall scored reliefs of the beautiful plans for the nearby Abbey Mills pumping station, built by celebrated Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette, into the concrete panelling of his own building.
The Greenway, a pathway along the Northern Outfall, has now been renovated and resurfaced with robust concrete inlaid with reclaimed materials. This series of straight, engineered paths now forms a linear park that reflects the technology of the infrastructure beneath; it is an engineering feat that ploughs through the existing, unkempt plant life, preserving the essence of an area not unlike what Victor Hugo described as “bastard countryside”. For the Olympic Stadium, Peter Cook acted as a consultant to Populous. With its exposed trusses, it is reminiscent of the British high-tech tradition. Originally, the plan called for the 80,000-seat stadium to be converted after the Games to a permanent open athletics stadium with 25,000 seats. Indeed, the fact that this athletics facility was granted to the East End of London was one of the main reasons that London was awarded the Games. However, economics came into play, and the development company charged with finding both the funding for demounting the stadium and a suitable tenant was approached by not one but two football clubs who wanted to have a large stadium on the site. Despite its flexible architectural language and the thought put into its future use, the stadium is something of an oddity. With its wide white steel diagonal cross-bracing on the lower tier and a narrower band of white steel cross-bracing on the upper, crowned by two-legged floodlight stands, the architecture of the stadium expresses adaptability – a feature it may never get a chance to demonstrate. A new bid for the stadium’s future use will begin after the Games. The London 2012 stadium was not only designed to be dismantled, but to look that way. Although it appears inexpensive and simple, it cost £486 million – almost 50 per cent more than the Beijing National Stadium, which was derided for its opulence and its 110,000 tonnes of steel.
In March 2007, the overall budget for the Olympics was capped at £9.3 billion, having leapt from the £3 billion outlined in the initial bid. The main cause of the increase was a revision in the estimate for the building of the park. Consequently, the budgetary requirements for the construction of complex architectural structures had to be re-examined, as no structure could be seen to have major cost overruns in the face of the new limits, not even Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre. Its final £269 million price tag may be small in comparison with the overall cost of the Games, but it required the installation of a pair of temporary bleachers on the sides of the pool building that give it the outline of a diver leaping from the board with a parcel in either hand. After the Olympics, glass walls will panel the side elevations, and the building, which will serve as a municipal pool, will regain its original grace. The building that represents the acme of British architecture is the Velodrome. Its upturned wooden facade makes reference to the curved track within, yet the undulation of its roof and its circular plan also capture the drama and speed of the event it hosts. The Velodrome stands as a prominent symbol of expectancy for passing motorists on the main arterial road that defines the western border of the Olympic Park. The London Games will utilize 270,000 temporary seats, more than the last three Olympics combined. The idea is to move beyond the traditional Olympic park in which many venues are clustered together, as was the case in Sydney and Athens. That type of arrangement is difficult to repurpose afterwards. In this park, the venues are spaced out so that they can be absorbed more easily into the surrounding infrastructure once the Olympics are over. The venues are also divided among three sites, one at the park itself, one near Royal Victoria Dock, and one at Greenwich. This strategy of dispersal serves another goal, which is to place key events within the working heartland of the city so that selected images of London’s architectural highlights will be broadcast worldwide. In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the diving competition was held on the northern side of Montjuic with a view looking out on to the city. The camera tracked a diver’s fall, giving the audience at home a tantalizing view of the city’s downtown sights. The architects and master planners of Populous, the team in charge of what is called the “overlay”, the temporary buildings for the London Games, have used a series of these structures to highlight famous backdrops for different events. They placed the 6,000-seat auditorium for the archery event on Lord’s Cricket Ground, oriented so that the gaps between the stands provide views juxtaposing the famous old Lord’s Pavilion and the futuristically styled NatWest Media Centre by Future Systems. The approach reconciles two elements that have traditionally remained distinct in tourism campaigns for London: the historical and the modern – a fairly objective reading of what makes London special as an urban experience. The temporary architecture of the Games thus mediates between the potential contradictions of London. The Equestrian Arena at Greenwich revives and reinforces the concept of the grand axis, one of the ideas behind the landscaping of the park. It was established in the 1600s, when Inigo Jones built the Queen’s House. The main camera view of the equestrian venue will have the Queen’s House in the foreground and Canary Wharf behind. The old and the modern: London at its best. The Olympics have materially improved London and will change how it is perceived by the world.
