London Olympic Stadium

During this week i watched a documentry about the London Olympic Stadium. When watching this programme it showed me that when designing something of that scale you will come up against natural, physical and financial problems.

One of the reasons why London won their Olympic bid was because they said that the stadium would become a legacy and would remain in the city for many years. So this meant that the Architects, Populous, had to design a stadium which could be used for anything after the Olympics. However they came up with a clever solution to this, incase that they couldn't find a purpose for the stadium after the Olympics, they designed it so that the stadium could easily be taken apart and the parts recycled, meaning that they have a plot of land of which to rebuild on.

Natural problems the team faced was a south-westernly wind that blew towards the stadiums and they needed to make sure that this wind didnt produce a tailwind within the stadium as this could give some athletes an advanatge during the race and potentially make their times void depending on how high the wind speed is, just like Wilma Rudolph whos world record was not counted due to a high tailwind. To make sure this wind didnt funnel its way into the stadium, it meant that the stadium needed to have a roof on it so Populous deisgned a PVC fabric roof to be stretched over the stop of the stadium which meant the wind would travel over the top of the stadium and not funnel its way back into the stadium.

They had to design the stadium in the height of a recession in London and this meant a smaller budget than previous designs like the Birds Nest in Beijing. Initially for the exterior of the stadium they had intended on making it a big screen where images would run round the sides of the stadium however this would have been to pricey so rather than just having the skeleton for the stadium they had decided to have something like ribbons coming down the exterior with different images on. However this plan was stopped when the Olympic budget was cut by the government and the £7m that was slashed from this meant that this plan could no longer take place. This could have meant that the look of the stadium was not finished and potentially leading it to be an Olympic Stadium that didn't live up to it's billing. However a solution was reached when a private investor donated the money in order for the project to continue.

Those two problems show you that when you are designing something such as a stadium you are going to come up against physical issues made by other humans and more often than not many issues created will be due to nature and this is something you will just have to adapt to or find a solution to get around.



Construction of the Olympic Stadium

Time Lapse of the Olympic Stadium