Archinect - News

Olympic Displacement: Atlanta 1996 to Rio 2016

2013-04-15T17:35:00-04:00

Atlanta and Rio are but two chapters in the long history of displacement that has accompanied mega-events like the Olympics. Similar dynamics reshaped London’s Clays Lane Estate, Beijing’s hutongs, the Marousi Roma settlement in Athens, Barcelona’s Poblenou and Seoul’s hanoks. . . . Today the people of Vila Autódromo are struggling for what housing scholar-activist Chester Hartman has aptly called “the right to stay put.”

As plans unfold for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, MIT's Lawrence Vale and Annemarie Gray consider the case of Vila Autódromo, a former fishing colony on the Olympic site whose residents have organized to resist displacement. They compare ongoing events in Rio to the demolition of Atlanta's Techwood Homes, the first public housing in America, prior to the 1996 Olympics.

Putin's Olympic steamroller in Sochi

2013-02-07T11:44:00-05:00

"But now the Olympics is hell for me and for everyone who lives along this street. It is hell and we feel very bitter towards the government. Even if it is prestigious for the country to host the Games it is a calamity, a real calamity."

Daniel Sandford explores the disruptions, the preparations for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics are causing for citizens. People have been relocated to make way for the Olympic Park and other facilities, however they complain that they haven't been fully compensated. Plus, it is already become the most expensive Olympics ever, although it is argued that this is because the resort and all associated facilities/infrastructure are having to be built-from-scratch. Moreover, Dmitry Chernyshenk the President of ANO 'Organizing Committee Sochi 2014' argues "We are leaving a great transport legacy".

Architectural White Elephants: Beijing, London, and The Post-Olympics Curse

2012-08-14T19:43:30-04:00

Sydney spent three times its original $2 billion Games budget—its Olympics facilities still operate at a loss. Most of Athens’ stadia remain empty, some in graffiti-covered disrepair.

The architecture of London 2012 official Olympic sponsorship

2012-08-14T19:31:00-04:00

Give Coca-Cola points for architectural originality. It has built what looks like a series of red and white plastic blocks that have just been hit with buckshot and are exploding into shards. What is this thing? It is the Coca-Cola Beat Box, a “building that you can play,” as the company’s many young docents will exuberantly explain.

David Segal took readers on a tour of the corporate sponsorship pavilions at London's Olympic Park. Mr. Segal found corporate self-promotion run amok. Along with a range of architectural follies.

London 2012 BMW Pavilion by Serie Architects

2012-08-13T17:16:00-04:00

With the London 2012 Olympic Games still fondly in our memories, here is another architectural attraction you may have missed while watching the recent sporting events: the London 2012 BMW Group Pavilion designed by Serie Architects.

Olympics 2012: What happens next?

2012-08-08T13:18:00-04:00

London’s surprising win that morning was attributed to its focus on urban regeneration and legacy: perhaps the first time an Olympic bid had specifically presented the Games as merely the warm up for a longer-term rejuvenation.

Remember When the Olympics Used to Have an Art (and Architecture) Competition? No?

2012-07-26T14:05:00-04:00

It was International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin's great dream to marry the aesthetic with the athletic—thus, every Olympics between 1912 and 1948 awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals to artists. There were five categories of individual competition: Architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music.

Charles Downing Lay was the only American to win a medal in 1936, taking home silver in the Municipal Planning division of the Architecture category for his design titled "Marine Park in Brooklyn."

Diving ticket-holders informed of obstructed views in Zaha-designed Aquatics Centre

2012-07-26T14:01:00-04:00

The 600 seats in question only concern 10-meter platform events, which start Monday. Small portions of the dives may not be visible. The Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatics Centre features a dipping roof that limits viewing from the highest seats.

Olympic Urbanism: The Athletes' Village

2012-07-20T14:06:00-04:00

At the 1928 Amsterdam games, athletes were accommodated in spare rooms in boarding houses and aboard ships. The first Olympic Village was built in 1932, in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it was dismantled after the games and virtually no trace survives today. Not until the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki did host cities began to plan and develop permanent structures for housing athletes.

When the Olympic Games open next week in London, showpiece venues like Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre and Populous’s Olympic Stadium will be the center of the world’s attention. But when the games are over, the greatest impact on London urbanism will be from the 2,800 new apartments converted from athlete housing. On Places, Anisha Gade looks at the history of Olympic Villages, from derelict ruins in Berlin to suburban townhomes in Sydney to a large public housing development in Athens.

How To Fill An Empty Bird's Nest: Beijing's Olympic Woes

2012-07-10T13:55:00-04:00

Ai Weiwei has never set foot inside the [Bird's Nest]. He told NPR that the stadium has become entirely divorced from ordinary people. "We love this building, but we don't like the content they have put in, the kind of propaganda. They dissociated this building [from] citizens' celebration or happiness, [it's] not integrated with the city's life," Ai said. "So I told them I will never go to this building."

The attached photos were taken by me on a recent trip to Beijing.

Zaha calls London Olympics organizers "rude"

2012-05-21T13:33:00-04:00

The architect who created the £269 million aquatics centre has criticised “rude” Games bosses for not inviting her to a single event. Zaha Hadid claimed she was not asked to the opening or closing ceremonies of the Games, or to any of the diving and swimming heats at her acclaimed building in the Olympic Park.

London Data Center Geeks Will Live in Pods to Dodge Olympic Traffic

2012-04-13T19:01:00-04:00

Staffers at some London data centers won’t be burdened with long commutes when the 2012 Olympics roll into town this summer and jam up city streets. Instead, they’ll have futuristic sleeping pods to crash in so they can never leave work. In the past month, a London company called PodTime has sold 19 pods at £1,375 ($2,190) a pop to three collocation facilities, including a data center operated by Interxion, says Jon Gray, the founder of the 1-year-old company.

Before Olympics It's Demolition Derby

2012-03-05T15:13:00-05:00

The authorities think progress is demolishing our community just so they can host the Olympics for a few weeks

Brazilian government is evicting people and demolishing thousands of homes to stage the Olympics and the World Cup.

“These events were supposed to celebrate Brazil’s accomplishments, but the opposite is happening,” said Christopher Gaffney, a professor at Rio’s Fluminense Federal University. “We’re seeing an insidious pattern of trampling on the rights of the poor and cost overruns that are a nightmare.”

The favela evictions have struck a particular nerve on the streets. A network of activists in 12 cities estimates that as many as 170,000 people may face eviction ahead of the World Cup and the Olympics. In Rio, evictions are taking place in slums across the city, including the Metrô favela near the Maracanã stadium, where residents who refused to move live amid the rubble of bulldozed homes.

Thought and quality: London's (2012) Olympic Village

2012-01-10T20:36:00-05:00

Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration.

Rowan Moore visits the 2012 Olympic Village in London. The now athlete and later, mix of affordable and for profit, mass housing estate, is a massive go at post-Olympic regeneration. The village features design and planning work by the likes of Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 and he acknowledges that in a former job he helped select them. However, despite the strengths and weaknesses of the project, what is most disappointing to Moore is the fact the precedent it sets comes as the result of the huge energy associated with the Olympic Games and not just standard operating procedure.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower

2011-12-13T19:58:58-05:00

The name of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower is a real mouthful, a hybrid title for a mongrel artwork. The contorted steel “sculpture-cum-tower-cum-engineering feat,” in the inelegant phrase of Tate director Nicholas Serota, is the totem of our Olympic games, rising more than 375 feet out of the central plaza of the park, on former light industrial land equidistant between Stratford and Hackney Wick in east London.

London's Olympic venues challenge architects

2011-11-29T00:10:56-05:00

In London's case the practicality of the architecture is a reaction to the economic rather than the political excesses of the recent past. The 2012 Games are shaping up, in fact, as one of the clearest signs yet that the architectural boom years of the last decade or so in the West have definitively ended.

Architecture student's design selected for £5 Olympic coin

2011-11-13T22:13:20-05:00

Saiman Miah, studying for his Masters degree at Birmingham School of Architecture designed the Olympic coin which features architectural elements of London's skyline and pictograms of athletes around the edge to create a clock face inspired by Big Ben.

Results of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Port Competition

2011-07-08T21:39:36-04:00

In the competition for the Olympic Port in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the winning entries have been announced. [...] The competition aims to rebuild the old harbor area of Rio and thus be an important agent of this long-awaited process of urban renewal for the city and the entire region.

Template for future

2011-06-09T08:42:13-04:00

Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), said building a temporary indoor venue of its size was unprecedented and could form the basis of an International Olympic Committee plan to bring down the cost of hosting the Games. "It makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to take the Games beyond the richest cities in the world. To do that, you've got to bring the costs down," he said.

The £42m 12,000-seat basketball arena at the Olympic site in east London, is designed to be deconstructed after the Games and its seats sold off to other event organisers.

Future Olympics: A Reusable, Floating Venue

2011-04-19T11:06:31-04:00

Inspired by artificial structures for marine environments, Burt developed a conceptual array of Olympic facilities, including a stadium, that could be transported along waterways and moored in major port cities.

Michael Burt, professor emeritus of architecture at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, has developed a proposal for a re-usable, floating venue to host Olympics events.