Collapsible, Flatpack Olympic Stadium

The organisers of the London Olympics are planning to pass on more than just the Olympic flag to the next host city when the games end in September 2012.

can the 55,000 seats stadium be dismantled, boxed up and shipped to the next country to be rebuilt?

The tactic of recycling the Olympic stadium has been billed as the first step in a new approach to the games, which could become more like a travelling circus to keep costs down and allow poorer countries to play host.

"If we could box it up and ship it to the next games, that's something that could benefit the Olympic movement," said Doug Arnott, director of sports and operations at Chicago 2016. "We have had preliminary discussions about what London's stadium design team are planning and how it might fit in. This is to do with the responsible use of materials and trying to avoid leaving infrastructure that will burden a city."

'pass-it-on'

Any sustainable minded surveyor of large scale events wonders if the expense and waste associated with showpiece stadiums could be reduced, even just a little. Well, the organizers of the London Olympics have a remarkable plan that could offset construction costs, and be sure that their stadium finds a purposeful second life. Currently there are plans in place to dismantle around 70% of the proposed London Olympic Stadium, pack up the components, and send them to the host of the 2016 Olympics! Finally, flatpacked, prefab stadiums!

The concept is part of a new approach to the Olympic Games. Rather than building everything new every four years, the “prefab” stadium idea allows facilities to be built in one city, moved as efficiently as possible and be adapted to existing arenas in the new host city. In the case of London, this particular stadium was specifically designed by HOK Sport to be disassembled and sold on, preventing wasteful obsolescence. The London Olympic Stadium is effectively designed as a 25,000 seat concrete bowl that has an additional 55,000 seats placed on top of it in a temporary structure. It is this entire upper structure which can be moved and installed somewhere else.

Currently, talks are underway with Chicago, but London organizers hope that their offer is taken up by whoever wins the games. If the plan goes forward, this would be the largest amount of seats ever moved from one place to the next, and the first time in history that a stadium of this size has been moved.

**Last year, 16,000 seats which had previously been used at the 2006 football World Cup in Germany were shipped to Barbados where they were used in the ICC Cricket World Cup
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/27/olympics2012.london
guardian.co.uk 

Inhabitat

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