The London Velodrome, The 2012 Olympic Games’ Most Sustainable Venue

Architizer News

The London Velodrome, The 2012 Olympic Games’ Most Sustainable Venue

November 30, 2011

With the 2012 London Olympic Games set to launch in just under 8 months, construction on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is drawing to a close. Surprisingly, nearly all of the main venues were completed on time earlier in the year, and some were even finished on budget–a rarity in the business of making object buildings. Up until an extensive 2-year long planting program was recently concluded this past month–qualifying the Olympic campus as the U.K.’s largest urban park–many of the finished buildings, including Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Center and the temporary basketball arena, sat like beached whales stranded amid a muddy landscape strewn with rogue streaks of turf hills. The London Velodrome, whose Pringle-like profile evokes a simplicity altogether foreign to the fractured and fluid solipsistic forms such events tend to inspire, is perched gracefully on one such knoll, encircled by a groved lip of plantings.

The double-curved roof takes cues from the dynamism of the cycling event which it will house, mimicking the bulge and dip of the racetrack to great effect. The supple sway of the roofline is complement by the facade’s lush wooden cladding, which will acquire a silvery sheen over time. Inside, a vast assemblage of trusses connect to a ring beam that suspends the 130-meter cable net structure spanning overhead. All told, the steel amounts to a 100 tons, a lean figure compared to the 3,000 tons needed to build Hadid’s similarly-sized Aquatics Center. That minimal engineering coupled is part of an “integrated holistic design” that has made the London Velodrome the Olympic Park’s most sustainable structure, says Klaus Bode, one of the project’s environmental engineers. By exploiting building technology software throughout the design process, the architects and engineers were able to optimize the stadium’s performance without recourse to add-ons like wind turbines or photovoltaics.