The 2012 Olympic Games are almost upon us! With tomorrow’s opening ceremony, London will welcome thousands of visitors into the Olympic Park, as well as the millions of viewers who will be watching the proceedings from their homes. Many athletes will compete, hoping to win the gold and the glory, but many people do not realize that architecture is also an Olympic event. With many gigantic venues having to be built from scratch, the Olympics is a time for designers, from starchitects to unknowns, to prove their mettle. Here, we present a round-up of many of the Olympic projects we’ve covered, and some we haven’t. Click on through to see the venues and other assorted architectural paraphernalia.

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Architectural light shows seem to be having their halcyon days, as more artists, architects and designers are turning to nighttime neon projections to breathe life into already incredible spaces. Last year, Lyon’s Festival of Lights saw a building reprogrammed into a massive playable pinball machine, and the Bring to Light Festival featured a total of fifty-nine site-specific artworks that illuminated Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s urban context. Starting today, Chicago’s famed Millennium Park will be another site for luminous architecture, as Anish Kapoor’s beloved Bean, more properly known as ‘Cloud Gate,’ will give off warped reflections of Chicago-based collective Luftwerk’s choreographed light show. When the sun sets, a total of ten projectors will be used to generate ‘Luminous Field’ and turn Chicago’s AT&T plaza into an even more vibrant, interactive public space.

This is not Luftwerk’s first collaboration with an iconic architectural setting; creative duo Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero were also the team behind the light installations at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in 2011 and at Wright’s Robie House in 2010. Their fascination with the interaction between space, structure, and material landed them this most recent commission from the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture, which Bachmaier calls “a great gift to the city.”

‘Luminous Field’ will be on show at Chicago’s Millennium Park from Feb 10th – Feb 20th.

[Images and video via Colossal]

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The ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower, the 375-feet-tall grotesque totem of the London Olympic games, has been complete, and the spiraling red steel monument now awaits the masses to escalate its contorting stairway and regenerate funds for East London. Though co-creator Anish Kapoor described the work as part Babel, part Eiffel and part Tatlin, to Arup engineer Cecil Balmond, the structure defies the semblance of structural logic that so defines its iconic predecessors and even resists laying claim to engineering magic: “We want people to forget the engineering, the construction, the materials and simply ‘experience’ it.”

Whether it is an awareness-tingling experience or just another money-sucking spectacle, the tower–which has garnered many colorful descriptions from “21st century Column of Trajan” to “overgrown maypole”– had to endure the same grounding process of construction as does any work of architecture. Architect Magazine has recently released some snippets of elevation and section drawings for Kapoor and Balmond’s hybrid artwork, and whether these impede or add to your experience of the object, we’ll leave up to you. Drawings after the jump.

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The final loop of London’s ArcellorMittal Orbit was installed last Friday, completing what BDOnline calls the “mutant child of the Eiffel and Tatlin towers.” The 560m of writhing red steel was the brainchild of Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, and their tangled sculpture now looms 115m above London’s Olympic Park. Read on.

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The FXFOWLE-designed Museum of the Built Environment — which “aims to explore the role that social, economic, and environmental forces have played in the region’s constructed landscape, both historically and in recent times” – has begun construction in Riyadh. [via Architectural Record]

London’s 2012 transformation continues, as Cecil Balmond and Anish Kapoor near the half-way mark on the construction of their 300+ foot Olympic Tower. BD Online has a cool time-lapse sequence. [via BD Online]

Cooper-Hewitt has revealed the winners of their annual design awards – NY-based Architecture Research Office has won the architectural design category. [via Bustler]

A pre-Tsunami German plan to phase out the nation’s reliance on nuclear power has been accelerated amid concerns over a disaster-preparedness, with the target date for a complete nuclear shut-down now set for 2022. [via NYT]

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“Leviathan,” Anish Kapoor’s newest piece, opened Wednesday to huge amounts of critical and popular praise (though not completely without qualms).

It’s hard to pass judgement on the project, since it’s obviously a quite experiential,  phenomenological piece (visitors have likened the piece to a series of giant, echoing wombs). But just looking at the pictures make us feel that I’m-going-to-miss-it panic that sets in when seeing or hearing about a far-away piece that’s clearly going to be become one of those historically seminal works. Anyone want to fly us to Paris?

Click through for images, and a bit more info.

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In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists at Princeton University have discovered sponge-like creatures in South Australia’s ocean reefs, evidence that the first animal life appeared 650 million years ago (previously estimate: 550 million years). Situ Studio, a digital fabrication design firm, helped create 3D models of the fossils by using a process similar to a CT Scan; stacking flat samples (in this case 50 microns long) and reconstructing it digitally. Designer win! [via Princeton University News]

The ArcelorMittal Orbit is red steel string loop inspired by the shape of string—a departure of sorts from other work by Anish Kapoor. Londoners aren’t exactly happy about it: some call it the Colossus of Stratford, for others it’s Boris Johnson’s folly. [via ArtInfo]

Congrats to Bates Masi + Architects, winners of two AIA New York State Design Awards in the Residential Small Project Category. The two winning houses are the Pryor Residence in Montauk, New York and Noyack Creek in Southampton, New York. [via Architecture Lab]

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