2012 OLYMPICS SITE - LONDON, UK

Underpinning the development for the 2012 London Olympics is a focus on sustainability. This strategy may well have helped London win the bid for these Olympics when they narrowly beat Paris back in 2005. In preparation for their Olympic bid, the London Olympics committee hired Bioregional and the World Wildlife Fund as sustainability consultants to craft "Towards a One Planet Olympics", a plan for achieving the first sustainable olympic games and paralympic games. They mapped out a strategy based on the 10 principles of their One Planet Living challenge. Once in motion, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) put in place a plan that included environmental testing, reporting and enforcement to ensure the team was tracking toward the goals. 

The site comprises over 2.5 km² (608.9 acres). This area served as an industrial and landfill site for the city of London. For the past 400 years waste has accumulated and contaminated the site. By the time this site was considered for the Olympics, development solutions had failed to pencil out due to the high cost of hazardous materials cleanup.  In preparation for Olympic development, contractors excavated and cleaned over 1.4 m tons of soil then reused it on site.  The River Lea and its tributary streams run through the center of the site. The river carried this contamination further downstream. The ODA transplanted thousands of reeds by seed to a nearby botanical garden, grew them and moved them to a wetlands area. Once fully established they then transplanted them again as mature wetlands to the Olympics site in 2011. Similar strategies were implemented to transplant native animals and insects and return them to the site. Indigenous plants were selected throughout the site to attract the local insects, and water fowl. The concept behind the landscape plan is restorative; bringing back a thriving biodiversity that predated the industrial habitat. The beauty of this solution is that it also reduces water usage and increases ease of maintenance. That is not to say that the landscape is wild and free - far from it. The plantings are native wild flowers that would, under normal circumstances, flower and die by midsummer. To grant the athletes and visitors colorful blooms in early August next year, the flowers were planted late in the spring season to encourage blooms well into the summer. If my visit today is any indication, the banks of the Lea will be blanketed in color for the opening ceremonies in 2012.

Site map from the London Olympics Development Authority

With more than 10 different rail routes serving Stratford Station, the site will be well served by the London public transportation network. And with all this investment in infrastructure, parking structures are not part of the mix. Visitors will have to leave their cars in the driveway for these Olympics.

The Venues

The Olympic stadium, velodrome, handball and aquatics arena are permanent facilities at the Stratford area site of the 2012 London Olympics.

With its elegant form and warm wood cladding, Hopkins Architect’s velodrome is sure to be the architectural sweetheart of the games. The bowl shape is expressive of the building’s purpose. A series of ramps and earth berms engage the building with the site. A wedge of earth is carved away leaving a prominent entrance. Londoners have a history of naming their buildings after whatever inanimate object it most represents – The Shard, The Gherkin, The Eye, etc. The velodrome is already being referred to as “the saddle” and it may very well stick.  

The Olympic Village will house 17000 athletes and officials. They are designed to be converted to apartments after the games. In order to house more people in less space during the games they were built without kitchens. The retrofit for future residences uses far less resources than building more than the market can bear to house the athletes only to tear them down once they leave. The Qatari ruling family’s property company must have factored this in. They recently bought the village for 557 million pounds.

With the aquatics arena Zaha Hadid finally had the chance to build something in her own back yard. Images for the ‘legacy’ building are fluid, dynamic and evocative – everything you would expect from Hadid.

Aquatics Facility Legacy Image from the London Olympics Development Authority

For the Olympics, the building is equipped with a temporary water polo structure at one end and grandstand structures on either side of the arena to provide 15,000 additional seats for fans and press during the games. They cost less than permanent structures, used fewer natural resources and are designed to be easily disassembled. Unfortunately, these saddle bag appurtenances are overtly functional and temporary and are a disappointing burden on the buildings elegant design.

Temporary Basketball Arena

I’m going to get on my soap box for a minute because there’s room for improvement in regards to the temporary structures. It’s difficult to argue against providing temporary accommodations for venues that will have peak visitation in their first month of use, then never see that number of visitors again. When a number of the so-called temporary facilities from the London Millenium celebration are still in use (London eye and Millenium Dome to name two) there is a strong case to also make “temporary” structures well-designed. International EXPO structures are another (albeit pricey) example. At the 2010 World EXPO Shanghai spared no expense for an event that lasted 26 weeks. Four of these pavilions remain on permanent display. If you are going to seek the brightest and best design talent and demand world class buildings for the permanent venues, why would you not demand the same excellence for the temporary structures? The Olympics are as much fashion statement as they are tourist venue. The venues should be both well designed and highly sustainable. The temporary structures at the Olympics are truly breaking new ground in sustainability. Consider this my personal plea to the designers of the 2016 venues – go one step further and make them look cool too.

Energy Center

The campus is powered by an on-site gas-fired combined cooling and heating plant (CCHP) with built-in flexibility to modify the fuel source in the future to renewable fuels as these become available. The waste heat from the power production is used for district heating. The heat will also be used to generate cooling via absorption chillers to the press building. Given that the athletic facilities will be used in the heat of summer, the measures for cooling these buildings are more relevant to consider. 

The Olympic Flame

Anish Kapoor designed the sculpture that will burn during the olympic and paralympic games. It is officially titled “Arcelor Mittal Orbit” after the man who financed the structure. Kapoor’s bean sculpture “Cloud Gate” at Grant Park in Chicago is ethereal and surreal. The images of his lens-like sculpture “Sky Mirror” in Rockefeller Center are also stunning. The Orbit isn’t complete yet, but this one left me a little uneasy, and according to Kapoor, that is the point. He designed it to look as if it were about to topple. I won’t try to explain, You can listen to him and judge for yourself. None of you asked for it, but my opinion is the size of the structural members are too heavy for the load they support. That could be part of the mystery. The piece has a way of drawing your attention and asking you to restore the balance. This is a departure from his previous minimal forms, but people will flock to this sculpture like they do his other public work. When they do, they will debate its merits just as I am now.


These Olympic games have set out to achieve what no other single event has done. It's not merely the fact that the site was planned as a sustainable development and event from the outset, though this is a major achievement. What is truly original about these games, is that they will bring  sustainable design and construction into the main stream on a global scale. Bob Costas will be espousing the merits of district energy to billions of viewers. Sustainability itself will be an Olympic athlete. The question is, will it bring home the gold?

Please forgive the quality of the photos. The site was tightly controlled for security so my photos were all taken through the window of a tour bus. Better images are available on the official London 2012 site