Day One: Today we were led on an expedition by Architect Ken Allison through the urban playground for the prolific and adventurous architect; London. The city is a built form of complexity, of Contextualism, futurism, pre-classicism, modernism, brutalism,and deconstructionism. Ken talks about the city as if it were his best friend, and explains its history through chalk diagrams on the sidewalk. The tour gave us insight in the formation of today’s London, our next visit would show us the future direction of London…
The site of the 2012 Olympics is surreal. Enormous man made structures surrounded by piles of decontaminated soil. The current
debate in the media is Olympic form vs. Legacy form. The Olympic form is massive and awkward, Zaha Hadid’s legacy form of a curavature aquatic centre is unrecognizable in between the additional 25,000 box seats plugged onto its ends. The main stadium by Populous once designed to legacy mode by having detachable top tier seating has now been bought by a football team and these seats will remain changing the whole intent of the design. Tensile fabric designed to wrap the circumference of the stadium to project media was value managed out by the new government, but whom have now decided to reiinstate the fabric. They are currently test fitting design options. The endless residential towers of the Atheletes village is a scene directly from a Shanghai. 2800 apartments need to accomodate 17,000 atheletes. Kitchens are currently rooms, and will be retrofitted with fixtures after the games, and sold onto the public and some used for social housing. The importance of integrated design becomes evident through this process. Jetlag begins to hit in the afternoon, and we retire to a warm pub meal and some rest, ready for the next 9 days…