O2 Arena badly damaged as high winds wreak havoc in London

2022-02-18T12:34:00-05:00

Social media is buzzing about the unreal damage to the O2 Arena's PTFE-coated glass fiber roof, which tore off during a live performance in the early morning hours Friday. A spokesperson for London’s Fire Brigade told the Evening-Standard there is no “actual collapse” of the roof or structural damage to the 22-year-old arena otherwise. More significant buildings across the capital were damaged by the storm’s 70+ mile per hour winds, including Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Centre, which lost considerable parts of its facade.

More and more of the Dome is being shredded pic.twitter.com/EUgyH2ryvK
— Ben Hubbard (@BJFHubbard) February 18, 2022

The scene is reminiscent of the collapse that happened to Montreal's Olympic Stadium the same winter that the O2 (then called the "Millennium Dome") opened. The Rogers Stirk Harbour-designed arena was originally meant to be a temporary structure before undergoing a conversion into a full-service entertainment venue in 2005. A Fugees reunion concert th...

London's Millennium Dome is turning 20

2019-12-06T15:15:00-05:00

It was supposed to be the ultimate symbol of Cool Britannia. Instead it became a nightmare that exposed the spin and hubris of the New Labour project [...]

The Observer's architecture critic, Rowan Moore, revisits the events leading up to the opening night debacle of the Richard Rogers-designed and much hyped, but ultimately failed, London Millennium Dome on January 1st, 2000.

"The Millennium Experience that it contained then is dimly remembered, like a TV soap opera that didn’t catch on," Moore writes. "It was eclipsed, as Blairite catastrophes go, by the invasion of Iraq three years later."

Aerial view of the Dome in 2005. Photo: Messer Woland/Wikimedia Commons

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O2 Arena badly damaged as high winds wreak havoc in London

London's Millennium Dome is turning 20