Completed Olympic Arena Makes Case for Temporary

Architizer News

Completed Olympic Arena Makes Case for Temporary

June 10, 2011

The London 2012 Olympic Games Basketball Arena. Photo: Getty Images.

Temporary architecture usually incorporates some combination of mobility, lightness, and minimal mass (or even, in the age of Pritzker/ Serpentine Gallery/world expo revivals, extravagant pavilions).

Rarely does one think of the Olympics, whose agenda — despite the ephemeral nature of the games — has long been to construct weighty, gargantuan structures destined for inclusion on every tourist itinerary.

Click through to see more of the London 2012 Olympic Games Basketball Arena.

Photo: Getty Images

The Olympics are an excuse to showcase wealth and initiate urban regeneration. Barcelona heavily promoted the 1992 Olympics as a catalyst to quickly injecting development into neglected or underdeveloped parts of the city. For the 2008 Olympics, Beijing flexed its new economic muscle by spending huge sums of money on new infrastructure, whose glamor and urgency was most visible in the inimitable Bird’s Nest by Herzog & de Meuron.

Architecture is an Olympic sport in and of itself, where monumentality accounts for power, sexiness for speed. So it’s a strange thing that the 2012 Olympic basketball arena was designed as a temporary, i.e. “not monumental”, structure, one of the largest ever to be built for the games. Granted, London has also built a £500 million main stadium and another absurdly expensive venue, the Olympic Aquatics Center, designed by Zaha Hadid. But the total sums from both these complexes and the Olympic village in general persuaded London’s Olympic Committee to realize the arena as a temporary construction.

Photo: Getty Images

A basketball arena tag-team designed by Sinclair Knight Merz together with Wilkinson Eyre and KSS has just been completed, and was one of the fastest structures to be built for the games, ready an entire year in advance. Work began in October 2009, with the 1,000-ton steel frame being completed in March of last year; the all-white cladding was installed soon after, with the interior finally furbished over the past couple of months. The stadium as such will have its fifteen minutes next summer, then be deconstructed and shipped elsewhere for use.

The decision to employ a temporary structure for the Olympics speaks truthfully to the nature of the games itself, but also negates the common perception that permanency of structure equals monumental architecture. It also avoids the inevitable neglect and uncertainty that befalls the largest, most grandiose of Olympic stadia. Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) hopes that the temporary and shippable arena would serve as a model for future Olympic 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.”

Could these temporary, mobile monuments franchise the experience of the Olympics and other coveted events to cities around the globe?