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

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. — bustler.net

In view of recent events, I have found myself asking whether it is a good thing to make a piece of city where rioting is impossible. The Olympic Park, even in legacy mode, seems to be built for this purpose. — ICON

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. — thisislondon.co.uk

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders – checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones – start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city. — The Guardian

The Basketball Arena, by architects Wilkinson Eyre, is one of two venues that can be taken apart into kit form and transported. This one, which seats 12,000, consists of a tent-like membrane stretched over a random arrangement of curved forms. The chief of the 2016 Rio Olympics has expressed an interest in taking it to Brazil — Guardian

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. — Guardian

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

It is not too hard, then, to imagine a future Olympics held in temporary and reusable buildings. Not only would this save cities from debt, redundant venues and white elephant awards, it would also mean that the Games could be held in those with precious little money to throw away. A low-cost travelling Olympics could tour the world, taking in cities that might gain greatly from the event but could never begin to think of the equivalent of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre at Stratford. — Guardian

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. — Guardian