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 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.
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