Do you want to go to the Olympics in London? Don’t have tickets? It doesn’t matter!! There are a range of free events and London is going to be alive as the XXX Olympiad starts off on July 27th next year. Click here to chat with us live online to find a tour that suits you best www.london-olympiad.com.If you would like more information/detailed itineraries on our luxury 5, 7, and 10-Day tours feel free to contact me at info@london-olympiad.com.
SIX months from today, the eyes of the world will be focused on what was once a neglected patch of wasteland, an unlovely mishmash of industrial site and munitions dump, which required regular visits from the bomb disposal experts to make it safe for construction crews.
It is now the site of the London Olympic stadium, a symbol of regeneration in a neglected part of the East End, and the venue that will be preparing to host the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympic Games on July 27.
But in 2007, for a few months the stadium was better known to the Australian-led architects who were designing it as "the Blofeld scheme" in tribute to the arch-villain of the James Bond films and his penchant for futuristic secret lairs.
"You press a button and the whole thing collapses; we had a hydraulic solution in mind," says Brisbane-born Rod Sheard, senior principal at London-based Populous architects, a specialist sports design firm.
It was just one of the early flights of fancy that emerged from the brief from the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, which wanted no white elephants left behind.
Instead, it wanted a stadium that could host the world's biggest sporting event and then be adjusted for an entirely different purpose, more in keeping with London's future needs.
"Philosophically, we bought into the concept that this has to be a building that can be closed down to 25,000 seats, but can also take the biggest event in the world (85,000 seats)," Sheard says.
"We knew it was what the IOC (International Olympic Committee) wanted and we knew it was a way of pushing the envelope. The problem was we had absolutely no idea how to do it."
If anyone were qualified to create a solution, it was Sheard, his business partner, John Barrow, and their team. They had designed Sydney's Olympic stadium, the redevelopment of London's historic Wembley Stadium and the transformation of the once-ridiculed Millennium Dome into a superb indoor entertainment venue now known as the 02 Arena, which will double as the gymnastics venue during the Games.
They have had their fingers on practically every major sporting stadium in Australia (MCG and Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, Brisbane's Suncorp Stadium) and most of those in Britain (Wimbledon, Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, Ascot racecourse, Silverstone race track). And they are working on the main stadium for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Not bad for a pair of Brisbane boys who left Australia to try their luck in London. Sheard says the benefit of previous Olympic experience is that "it does make you a little bit braver; it gives you confidence to try new things and a different approach. Things that perhaps if you were doing it for the first time you would think: 'Ooh, we don't want to stuff this up. We'd better be cautious and careful and conservative with it'.
"So I think London has benefited from that, not just in the design of the buildings, but in the way you lay out the operation."
But for a while even they were scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to meet the London design brief.
"In three or four months we must have had 20 schemes," Sheard says. In addition to the Blofeld scheme there were the "Valentine's scheme" and the "Mother's Day scheme", all of which came to nothing.
"To some extent we had to unlearn what architects understood about building because architects are trained to worry about the future. They worry about whether the roof will leak in 20 years' time, will it have longevity? The whole culture of architecture questions: 'If it's a short-term building, is it really architecture? Surely, architecture is a building that stands proudly and serves a community for a hundred years'.
"So it took us a while to get to the point where we coined the phrase 'Embrace the temporary'. Once we started to get the team into that way of thinking, to think about temporary not as something we have to endure but as a freedom, when you started thinking like that, it's amazing how fast the ideas come running."
The other major influence on their thinking was the site itself, a piece of land that was almost an island, surrounded on three sides by a canal and cut off by a road and railway line on the remaining side.
The breakthrough came when they decided to consider the whole site as the stadium rather than just the concrete and steel edifice in the middle.
"The fact that we had an island was a massive benefit because we only had five bridges on to the island and by putting the control points (gates) on the bridges we didn't have to put up fences.
"It meant the area between the canal and the building is really the concourse so we have pulled all of the facilities (toilets, bars, concession stands) out of the middle of the building and put them on that concourse."
That way, any of those facilities that are excess to the requirements of the post-Games stadium can be easily removed. The result is a large stadium, containing many temporary features, which is "tighter and more atmospheric" than the average stadium.
"We managed to carve off (size); every 100mm was precious to us," Sheard says. "We want the people in the front row to be able to smell the athletes, not just see them.
"What we did was separate the building into parts. You could literally lift the roof and the diagonal legs off the bowl and nothing else would come with it. You could lift the bowl out and it's completely separate. There's a kind of clarity and simplicity that emerges because nothing affects anything else. It becomes a different type of building. It's a very sparse, lean building and from that it gains a certain style, a certain elegance, a certain minimalism, I suppose."
The firm's Sydney experience helped it to anticipate the kind of technology needed, to allow film director Danny Boyle, London's master of ceremonies, to produce the greatest show on earth, twice, for the opening and closing ceremonies.
Sheard recalls that in Sydney director of ceremonies Ric Birch came to them after the fact and said: "I've got this great idea for a waterfall down the stairs. Can we take 10,000 litres up the top and pour it down?" Then the architects and engineers had to figure out how to make it happen.
"That Sydney opening was a benchmark," Sheard says. "It broke the boundaries for all opening ceremonies when that little girl (singer Nikki Webster) lifted off the pitch. Since then all opening and closing ceremonies have gone aerial and quite right, too. Why have a show that's two-dimensional in a space that's three-dimensional? You want to use it and Beijing used it spectacularly (with gymnast Li Ning "running" around the roof of the stadium to light the cauldron).
"When Danny was appointed (fresh from his triumph with Slumdog Millionaire) and the ceremonies team was on board, we were confident we had a building that could take a lot of what was needed to lift people up in the air."
But that doesn't mean the stadium has taken flight without enduring some turbulence. No Olympic stadium does.
In London's case the two issues have centred on the hi-tech fabric "wrap" that is meant to enclose the stadium, providing a canvas on which to project images, and the venue's post-Games use.
The $10 million wrap was dumped as a cost-cutting measure by the Olympic Delivery Authority in the midst of Europe's economic meltdown in 2010. Then last year the multinational Dow Chemical stepped up to finance the stadium's skin, only to become mired in protest over its handling of the aftermath of a 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal, India, which killed thousands. Dow had bought Union Carbide, which had been responsible for the disaster at its pesticide plant in Bhopal, in 2001.
When its London Olympic sponsorship was announced, there were calls in India for its Olympic team to boycott the Games, the LOCOG chairman Sebastian Coe joined a long list of prominent public figures to be burned in effigy in the subcontinent, and British politicians called for Dow to withdraw its Games sponsorship over the issue.
Sheard acknowledges the wrap's "chequered career", but is confident that "sense will prevail" and it will be in place when the flame arrives in July. He says its function is "partially practical and partially aesthetic".
"It does affect wind movement around the stadium dramatically. It slows it down, it channels it, but most importantly it also controls the views into and out of the building and creates a certain sense of enclosure.
"The original design was very much a stadium in three parts. The concourse, where you can see the rest of the park, then you move through the wrap into the inner space, which is all painted black and it's almost like going behind the scenes of a theatre and you get the sense of entering a place of drama; and then you walk through the colour curtain, all the balustrading is coloured glass, and you are drawn towards these bright colours and then the whole bowl opens up and that's where the show is happening. It was a very thought-through process and as soon as you take the wrap away it dramatically changes, if not completely ruins it."
The Olympic Park Legacy Authority is charged with the job of steering the stadium into the future post-Games, but its clumsy handling of the tender process created a vitriolic tussle between Premier League soccer teams Tottenham and West Ham for the rights to the stadium. The duel quickly descended into lawyers at 10 paces, the entire process was abandoned and the OPLA is now starting again from scratch.
The perceived wisdom is that the stadium will not be viable without a major football tenant, but Sheard disagrees.
"We've got plenty of football stadia," he says. "We do need a good quality athletic stadium, that's a given, but what London really needs is somewhere for summer concert events, the ones that bring the centre of London to a halt when they are held in Regents Park or Hyde Park. And the London Olympic Park will be a brilliant venue for that."
But stadium legacy planning aside, Sheard believes London has been willing to take more risks than Sydney did ("Sydney is a world city but it was aspiring to be recognised as a world city") because it is more confident of its standing in the world.
"London is a self-assured, cosmopolitan city that has a huge mix of population, a very diverse community and it has that confidence about it that doesn't necessarily need to prove itself, but it wants to put on the Games and have a good Games and a couple of weeks of party," he says.
Populous's design work on the stadium is largely done but it has continuing responsibilities in setting the stage. The firm is also responsible for the "overlay" in the Olympic Park, ensuring that the right facilities are available in the right places (toilets, waste bins, benches, food and drink stands) for an area that has eight venues and will have 500,000 visitors on its busiest day.
"The last six months in many ways really puts the polish on it all," Sheard says.
"We have to make sure it's going to work. No matter how much thinking you do about these things, there are surprises. I always remember being at the first opening event at the Sydney Olympic stadium and we had dramatically underestimated the number of coffee machines we would need.
I think I counted 30 people in the queue for a cappuccino. You just have to learn from what you see."
********************************************************************************************************* Spyns is an active travel company based in Whistler, BC (Canada). For more information about Spyns and our package tours to the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games, including London Olympics hotels, London 2012 tickets, and summer games VIP access, please visit our websites http://www.london-olympiad.com/ http://www.london2012-tours.com/ and http://www.london-tours-2012.com/ or call us toll-free at 1.888.825.4720. www.spyns.com.
