"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." — BBC News
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... View full entry »
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. — thedailybeast.com
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. — NYT
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. View full entry »
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. — theatlantic.com
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." View full entry »
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. — sfgate.com
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. — Places Journal
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... View full entry »
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. — latimes.com
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. — telegraph.co.uk
Winners have been announced in the [LONDON] Information Pavilion. The international ideas competition, hosted by [AC-CA], invited architects and architecture students to design a temporary, freestanding information pavilion within the world famous Trafalgar Square in the Heart of London during the 2012 Olympic Games. — bustler.net
As the countdown to the 2012 Olympic Games in London begins the Guardian publishes an exclusive snap-shot and accompanying interviews to update us on the progress. Guardian View full entry »
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