Should London’s Olympic stadium be an iconic design?

YES!!
The stadium represents the image of the Olympics, and millions will see this structure.


If anything needs to be iconic, then it is the major sports stadium — look at Herzog & de Meuron’s Beijing stadium or Renzo Piano’s beautiful San Nicola stadium in Bari, Italy, built for the 1990 World Cup.


Part of the problem is that there was no competition for architects. If you are going to have a great Olympics, then you need great architects.


- Will Alsop


NO!!


Content over style is the issue here. The significance of this Olympic stadium is its very difference from its forerunners. It is not intended to be a lasting icon carrying the memory of the London games.


In the short term, its task is to accommodate a major sporting event. Long term, its role is to facilitate the transformation both of itself and its surroundings.


The design resolves these issues with disarming and elegant simplicity. The size has been reduced to an absolute minimum: a scale comparison of its cross-section with its foreign counterparts is extraordinary. It is demountable and reusable, so offers real possibilities perhaps for Glasgow in 2014 or whichever city gets the Olympics in 2016.


-Graham Morrison


NO!!


Its legacy will be the pattern of the city that follows: think Piazza Navona, the stadium at Lucca, or even our own project for Arsenal at Highbury.


Hadid’s Aquatics Centre and Hopkins’ Velodrome will be part of the permanent memory of this games. HOK’s stadium, by contrast, has to meet a more complex brief. It is more a Tubbs Dome of Discovery than a Martin Royal Festival Hall. It is more like Paxton’s Crystal Palace than Herzog & de Meuron’s stadium at Beijing. And, perhaps surprisingly to its critics, it is a building we believe Cedric Price would have endorsed for achieving so much more than its obvious brief — and without pomposity. We should applaud it.


- Bob Allies


"Should London’s Olympic stadium be an iconic design?", bdonline.co.uk