The Olympic Park – review
Work in progress: The Olympic Park, 10 May 2012. Photograph: Hackney Citizen
Here’s the thing about the Olympics. It’s a magnificent event, engaging, as it does, most of the planet in the innocent idea of playing games extremely well, and if it avoids disasters it can make the host nation feel good about itself. But it is also insanely expensive in both money and risk, thanks in part to the tyrannical demands of the International Olympic Committee, and profoundly unsustainable, as it requires an immense amount of construction for a 17-day event plus 12 for the Paralympics.
The numbers don’t add up, so the Games are sold to citizens on the basis of promises that turn out to be false. They will increase participation in sport and reduce obesity – they don’t. They will boost tourism – actually Olympic cities usually experience a decline in visitors. They will be sustainable, but only in the sense that a space rocket powered by biofuel would be sustainable. They will cost the government £2.37bn, or, rather, £9.3bn; or, if all associated costs are included, even more. So to make the Games work, circles have to be squared, compromises made and deals done. Sponsors become gods, because without them there would be no Games, and the branding police enforce their will. Demands of surveillance and security become boundless. Everything has to be on-message.
The contradictions of the Olympics are ingrained in the built fabric of London 2012, which is now essentially finished, awaiting little more than for the meadow flowers seeded in the site’s gardens to flourish in synchrony with the big event, and for the completion of the stadium wrapper sponsored by Dow Chemical. It’s an urban effort of a scale and ambition that this country has not managed for a long time. It has so far been smoothly delivered, without the baleful stories of near-disaster that accompanied the construction of the Athens Olympics, or the reports of multiple deaths on the Beijing stadium site.
There are intelligent strategies for dealing with at least some of the problems that usually afflict the Games. There are several well designed structures and not much that is downright terrible. During the recent test events in the Olympic Park there was some sense of community, arising from shared experience among many people, of a kind that was supposedly going out of fashion.
All of which is truly admirable, but it’s an achievement that comes with conditions and compromises. The stadium, like all its predecessors, struggles to find a viable future use. The sense of community is for Visa cardholders only and sustained by batteries of Rapier missiles. There is a weird alternation of the profligate and the miserly: to hold the Games at all is absurdly extravagant, and the security budget grows at will, but places such as the athletes’ village – where thousands will live in the future – are squeezed hard by time and money, such that they are less wonderful than they might otherwise be. The event is held in the name of the public but its portal is a private shopping mall.
Part of what is good about the Olympics is captured by buildings such as the wood-clad, wavy-roofed Velodrome by Hopkins Architects, a structure beautifully attuned to its purpose, spare in construction, which sits on a little hill with elegant festivity. Also by relatively unsung structures such as the temporary venues for basketball and water polo, which are stylish but relatively straightforward ways of getting the job done. Or the Copper Box, a plain but effective container for handball, which is one of the best works of its architects Make. Or the electrical substation, a handsome brick structure by the Glaswegian practice Nord, and the rust-coloured Energy Centre by John McAslan and Partners. Like Olympic sports, these embody the focused pursuit of the good to exceptional in a precise if limited field.
A lot of what is worst about the Olympics is captured by the Orbit: the grandstanding, the gesture-making, the unholy alliance of politicians and corporations in making expensive but empty statements that miss out any real connection with the human race. The Orbit, by the artist Anish Kapoor and the engineer Cecil Balmond, seems to be something to do with art, as expressed by its red squiggly form, and something to do with access, evidenced by the stairs rising up it, but the two don’t seem very happily combined.
The official blather is that it is “very aspirational, in a very appropriately Olympic way”: alternatively, you could listen to a man I overhead trying to explain it to his family – “It’s what they call sculpture. It’s just there to make you ask, ‘What is it?’ ”
It gobbles steel, which ruins the justified boast of the stadium that it was efficient in its use of this high-energy metal, and occupies land in a way that complicates the planning of this bit of the site for the post-Olympic legacy. It makes little attempt at harmony with, or even acknowledgement of, its neighbours, the stadium and the Aquatics Centre. And it will cost £15 to go up to the top. I suggest that residents of nearby council tower blocks charge £14.95 to visit their flats. The view will be just as good and visitors would gain a richer understanding of London and of humanity.
The stadium itself is nicely lean and taut, at least until the arrival of its Dow Chemical-sponsored-don’t-mention-Bhopal wrapper. It is not encrusted, as most modern arenas are, with the flummery of franchises and corporate hospitality, much of which is housed in separate pavilions at ground level. It is the perfect model of an austere structure for austere times, or would be if it hadn’t come with the un-austere price tag of £486m, with further public subsidy required to support a future use for it. It is also designed to be demountable, which is sensible, except that when Tottenham Hotspur proposed to demount it to build a viable (if hideous) football ground there, Lord Coe screamed blue murder and had it kept.
There is Zaha Hadid’s £269m Aquatics Centre, majestic if compromised by gawky temporary extensions to house the seating needed for the Games. There is the athletes’ village, where the dogmatic belief that the ideal form for cities is a grid of regular 10-storey blocks concurred with developers’ desires to build large, repetitive structures. The result is a robotic approximation of urbanity, in which curves and oblique lines are barely admitted, like a portrait drawn with an Etch A Sketch.
And there is the Westfield shopping centre, which is not strictly an Olympic project and would have happened in due course without the Games, but the 2012 organisers are keen to take credit for it and use it as evidence for their theories about regeneration. This is now a throbbing citadel of retail through which most Olympic visitors will be funnelled, but one that doesn’t bother much about the faces, or backsides, it presents to its surroundings.
Between these dollops of construction is green stuff and air: it is the park that has to make everything cohere and smooth the abrupt transitions between the lumps of building. Designed by the American landscape architect George Hargreaves, it does a remarkably good job, starting with the fact that it pays some attention, unlike most things Olympic, to what was already there. This is a watery place, criss-crossed with bits of the river Lea and associated channels, with multiple changes of level and fragments of its industrial past. As Iain Sinclair has pointed out, much was expunged to make way for the Games, but Hargreaves has the sense to use and improve what’s left, creating a closeness to water, a wandering, intricate tissue of overlapping layers and loose, shaggy planting.
In places the vegetation is dominated by the expanses of hard surface necessary to cope with Olympic crowds and by the temporary paraphernalia of the Games. At times it resembles rather small pieces of parsley on the large lumps of meat that are the sporting venues. But it’s vastly preferable to the arid plazas that usually serve the Olympics, and there is something wonderful about a rustic waterway that winds close to the side of the stadium. After the Games the hard surfaces will shrink, as will the many bridges over the water, and the green will increase.
There is intelligence, investment, talent and hard work in the Olympic park and buildings, albeit not always organised in the most useful way. No one could call the progression on to the site, through the razzle of Westfield towards the blank flank of the Aquatics Centre’s temporary seating, a well-considered entry to the greatest show on earth. What’s more, the good quality design and planning stop abruptly at the boundaries of the park: you don’t have to go very far before the stardust fades into the junkheap of Stratford town centre, where worn but serviceable old buildings are overlain by some of the most grotesque public art known to man and overlooked by exploitative apartment towers of developers’ tat.
During the Games, intense effort is put into throwing metal balls and sharp sticks or cycling in circles, and we are invited to admire not the thing itself but the way it is done. The 2012 constructional effort has a little more purpose – in that it creates a park, thousands of homes and a few other things – but it raises similar questions. As with throwing balls and sticks it shows good technique and fantastic delivery, as well as amazing levels of funding. But could they not be applied more directly to places where people actually live, including those a few hundred yards away? These are the kinds of things usually lacking in new schools, hospitals, housing and public space: why should they be found only within the sacred enclosure of the Games?
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