The two temporary stands increased spectator capacity from 2500 to 7500 during the Olympic games, but their removal will enable the building's conversion to a public swimming pool, set to open in spring 2014.

The final two 172-tonne trusses were removed yesterday and huge panels of glazing will now be installed along the two side elevations, allowing natural light into the building's three pools and corresponding with Zaha Hadid's original design. Once open, it will also offer a cafe, crèche and dry-dive training area.

The renovation forms part of the £292million legacy programme to convert the Olympic site into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which will open in phases beginning with North Park this July.

The Aquatics Centre could be used as a competition venue again if London wins its bid to host the 2014 FINA Diving Championships and the 2016 European Swimming Championships.

Hadid's building was completed in July 2011, a year ahead of the London 2012 Olympics and features an undulating wave-like roof and six curved concrete diving boards. See more images of the Olympic venues in our slideshow feature.

See more architecture by Zaha Hadid »
See all stories about London 2012 »

Photography by David Poultney for LLDC.

The post Wings removed from Zaha Hadid's
Olympic Aquatics Centre appeared first on Dezeen.

News: a gagging order preventing architects, engineers and builders from promoting their involvement in the London 2012 Olympics has been lifted after the UK government paid £2 million to the British Olympic Association.

The decision, announced by the chairman of the BOA, Lord Coe, and the secretary of state for culture, Maria Miller, is intended to boost Britain's economy by helping firms land contracts and deals on the back of their involvement with the games.

Dozens of companies that designed and built sports venues like the velodrome and the Olympic Stadium had previously been banned from associating themselves with the Games in their marketing materials, spurring New London Architecture chair Peter Murray to lead a protest against the ban last summer. He was joined by Angela Brady, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and John Nolan, president of the Institute of Structural Engineers.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport's £2 million payment to the BOA will establish a new ‘supplier recognition scheme’, allowing companies to apply for a free licence to promote their work at trade shows, apply for industry awards and promote their Olympics connections when competing for contracts.

The relaxation of the rules was a key recommendation of last summer’s report by Sir John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, on how the UK could maximise business benefits from the Games.

"I am very glad it is happening but it should have happened six months ago," said Murray in the Guardian. "The attention of the world is now on Rio and not on London. It will be a benefit to many firms, but all of the jobs for Rio have been allocated now."

RIBA president Brady also responded to the news with a statement, saying: "The majority of the architects and designers we were standing up for in the campaign were young small businesses who just wanted to be able to promote their work. It’s great that they are now able to speak freely about their contribution to the success of the 2012 Games and get the recognition they deserve."

Asked why companies had not been able to promote their association with the games in the first place, a BOA spokesman said: "These rights have a value, and it is through the sale of Olympic marketing rights that we create revenues so we can provide high-performance support to our athletes during the Olympic games."

Miller said the lifting of the gagging order meant companies could now benefit from their involvement in last year's games. "Now we have removed the barrier, companies can capitalise on the role they played at home and abroad by really selling their involvement in one of the biggest and most successful projects this country has ever put on," she said.

We reported extensively on Olympic architecture last year, from the controversial ArcelorMittal Orbit tower to the spotty PVC tents of the shooting venue – see all Olympic architecture.

Legacy plans for the Olympic Park currently include the transformation of the press building into a technology, design and research centre and the creation of up to 8000 new homes in addition to the athletes’ village.

Photograph by Edmund Sumner.

The post Architects of London 2012 Olympics
see gagging order lifted appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the lighting of the London 2012 Olympic Cauldron was conceived as a religious ceremony, designer Thomas Heatherwick has explained.

"The Olympic Games is phenomenally religious," said Heatherwick, who designed the cauldron. "The liturgy, the ceremonial dimension, is incredibly similar to a religious service."

Speaking about his cauldron design at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore last month, Heatherwick compared the Olympic stadium to a temple and the cauldron to an altar.

"There's very precise ceremonial aspects and a gravity to that process," he said. "In a way, the stadium represented the temple to that, and this funny faith that is an Olympics also has miracles that actually maybe you do believe in. You're not sure that someone ever did walk on water, but you do see this guy, who somehow is able to run faster than anything, and it's like miracles."

The Olympic opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle, was today cited by Monocle magazine as a key reason why Britain is now the most powerful cultural nation on earth.

Heatherwick decided to place his cauldron in the centre of the Olympic Stadium after working with Benedictine monks in England whose alter is at the centre of a circular abbey (below). "It felt so powerful where the alter is," Heatherwick said.

The cauldron consisted of 204 flaming copper "petals" mounted on tubes, which mechanically rose into the sky and came together to symbolise the coming together of athletes from around the world.

The design of the cauldron remained secret until the opening ceremony on 27 July, when the petals were carried into the stadium by representatives of each of the competing nations.

Heatherwick explained that even the volunteers who stood in for athletes at rehearsals for the opening ceremony were unaware of the design and location of the cauldron. "They would be looking up wanting to know where the cauldron was going," he said, not realising they were walking past it as they spoke.

The designer also explained how his studio researched past Olympic cauldrons and found that none of them had remained in the collective memory. "What people did remember was a moment," he said. "Almost everybody only remembered one moment, which was the Barcelona 1992 opening ceremony, where the archer was lighting the cauldron."

In a video interview with Dezeen conducted before the opening ceremony, Heatherwick said the cauldron was designed "not as a thing but as a moment".

See all our stories about Thomas Heatherwick | See all our stories about the London 2012 Olympic Games

Below is an edited transcript of Heatherwick's talk at WAF:

We worked on a project that needed to be very confidential, and it was for the London Olympic Games. There had been a decision taken that it needed to be one of the secrets of the Games. The other one was the Queen, waiting 86 years to show that she had a sense of humour. They managed to keep these two secrets.

The job was to make the holder and the flame that would be lit at the end of Danny Boyle's opening ceremony. We were very happy to be asked to do this project, but we were very aware that cauldrons were these very funny objects - a bowl on a stick with a flame in it. You know when everyone says that everybody's got a book in them? It was like, "What's MY cauldron? I'm into twists, let's do a twisted cauldron, or, I'm into square cauldrons, or a round cauldron," like it didn't have relevance to this phenomenal event, which was this coming together of 204 countries who for just two weeks don't squabble.

And [this is] a time when we are in general less religious, and certainly in Britain. My father lived in Spain for a while and loved that there were all these festivals that brought people together, and in Britain we have been embarrassed to have the Union Jack, as it has been associated with, sort of, national fascism. We don't have many things that bring us together. There was also a sense of, what do we do with this thing once the Games are over?

Typically, the Olympic parks are known for ending up as not as parks but as funny, weird derelict bits of ground five years after the games. And we were imagining whatever we designed sitting there ten years after, in a very sorry state with pigeon poo on it, and calling itself a fountain, spouting water where gas had come through. We just thought, how can the cauldron manifest the ephemerality, this temporary coming together for just two weeks?

This was a historic third time that London was hosting the Olympic Games. We sat with Danny Boyle and Danny was really interested in how we could possibly compete with Beijing's phenomenal scale and grandeur. Danny Boyle described it as unplugging the computer, reboot, start again, and a question of whether the cauldron could be be like an unmarked police car when it does a chase. When it decides it's going to chase, it gets the siren with a magnet and sticks it on the roof.

And where do you stick that cauldron on the roof? You've got this lovely pure simple stadium, and we were told that there was one particular part of it that had been strengthened to take 200 tonnes and it just felt that sticking it on the top of an object like that… why in one place? Why not another place? What was significant about any one bit of that roof?

We were also struck that in an Olympic Games the athletes parade happens and the 10,000 athletes all come in and the middle of the stadium becomes a total mess. The athletes are all there in a mish-mash and they're all mixed up with each other, and maybe it was a slight urge to tidy up, but it felt that there was this power, a simple power to this circular stadium.

We've been working with a community of Benedictine monks in England, helping them to finish their church. Their church was built in the late 60s after the second Vatican Council where the Catholic Church gave permission for different forms of liturgy. And that church is in the round; the liturgy is in the round, so that the alter sits in the middle of a very large circular roof. And it felt so powerful where the alter is.

And it seemed to us that the Olympic Games is phenomenally religious: the liturgy, the ceremonial dimension, is incredibly similar to a religious service. There's very precise ceremonial aspects and a gravity to that process. In a way, the stadium represented the temple to that, and this funny faith that is an Olympics also has miracles that actually maybe you do believe in. You're not sure that someone ever did walk on water, but you do see this guy, who somehow is able to run faster than anything, and it's like miracles.

The cauldron suddenly felt to us that it was a serious thing. Given its seriousness, the centre of that stadium suddenly took on an importance. Danny's urge that the opening ceremony should be rooted in the athletes and the spectators, and not just getting bigger and fatter and more enormous, seemed to chime.

So our cauldron's geometry was driven by exactly the shape of the stadium. It's just a direct offset of the very slightly elliptical stadium. And it struck us that, if we made that cauldron as sort of part of the stadium, all of the athletes would be, like, a Terry's Chocolate orange, or slices of cake, all the different countries, which would tidy up the athletes. And then the spectators seating almost became a ring above. The athletes, the spectators, and the main stadium itself somehow all became one object, one thing. And then this idea came of having something that no longer existed afterwards. How can these small things, 204 small things, make one thing that had meaning for two weeks, to then disperse, and these pieces could then go back to each one of the countries?

It felt to us that the metals gold, silver and bronze were going to be busy for the next three or four weeks, so copper - the material that British plumbing is made from, your boiler tank is made from - had this beauty, and this way that it would discolour in intense heat, that had value. Many years ago I'd spent some time raising copper sheets, using repousse hammers, which was where you would take the flat sheets of copper, anneal them, put them in pitch, and gradually shape, re-anneal them and stretch the metal into these forms. And so the same process on a larger scale is what's being used typically in the old wheel arches and body panelling of cars back 100 years ago.

And there are just a few people who can do this wheeling technique to shape the metal. there was a British engineering company who became involved and a British car panel historical restoration company who made these pieces. Each one of these pieces was engraved with the 30th olympiad and the name of the country.

in our analysis of Olympic Cauldrons we were given all of these DVDs where it took us an entire weekend to watch every Olympic ceremony there had ever been, and ceremonies of all the other kinds of sporting events. But what we found was interesting: no-one could remember the design of the cauldron. We were being asked to design an object, but actually none had really remembered those objects. What people did remember was a moment. Almost everybody only remembered one moment, which was the Barcelona 1992 opening ceremony, where the archer was lighting the cauldron. And there was a moment, where all of our minds were thinking: "Is he going to do it? And if he misses, there is probably someone up there to light it, but they're going to hit the person there to try and light it if he misses!"

You remembered the archer, but you didn't remember the cauldron. And so we wondered if there was a way to make that process be the object, and if the object and the process were the same thing. And that's what led us to this idea.  Each object was the size of an A3 sheet of paper - very small, and the stadium is gigantic. So at that moment when those objects were carried in we didn't know if anyone would even notice that these children were carrying in these pieces. We didn't know whether everyone would just groan and guess: "Yes, those are all little pieces of the cauldron".

We also designed the tickets and the programmes for all the ceremonies, and we took this gamble that we would hide it in full sight - each ticket had a giant picture of the cauldron, but because it wasn't a giant bowl on a stick, we hoped that you wouldn't recognise that it was the cauldron.

We didn't know if the [TV] commentators would give it away, despite the commentators not knowing what it was. There was a system where they would be given a piece of paper 20 minutes before something happened that they didn't know about. So they didn't know what those copper pieces were to become, other than being told to make people notice them.

The only way to keep it a secret was to rehearse at 3 o'clock in the morning when all of the volunteers and performers had gone home. You would talk to the volunteers who were there practising. During the rehearsals, they would have to practice the whole of the athletes parade, two hours, with no athletes. And so there were people walking along with plastic buckets, instead of [the elements of the cauldron], and bits of rope trying to be Spain, and for all of the athletes of each country. And you would talk to them, and you would find that when you spoke to them, they would be looking up wanting to know where the cauldron was going.

To make the project work, in effect it was making 204 cauldrons, and each one of those shapes was different. It felt to us that we couldn't have 204 identical things, and we knew we didn't want America to have a bigger one than Singapore. The thing that's happening now is that they're all being packaged up and being sent. Each piece has an imprint of that heat from the intensive two weeks; they became quite aged in that period of time.

The post "The Olympic Games is phenomenally
religious" - Thomas Heatherwick appeared first on Dezeen.

News: architecture critic Rowan Moore has labelled Renzo Piano's Shard skyscraper as a "serious failure of planning" and described claims that the Olympics will regenerate east London as "bullsh*t".

Moore, architecture critic of the Observer, said the £12 billion spent on the London 2012 Olympics had created a "big buzz" but criticised the organisers of the games for justifying the cost by claiming they would regenerate east London.

"The deal with the Olympics ought to be really simple," Moore (above) told Dezeen during a filmed interview yesterday. "It’s this very big amazing event which, if it goes well, gives the host country a big buzz, as happened with the London Olympics, and for that you have to pay £12bn, or whatever the real cost is. And that’s almost the beginning and the end of it. If you wanted to regenerate east London there’d be much, much easier ways to do it than holding the Olympics, and much cheaper."

He added: "But the people who promote the Olympics find it hard to admit that. They say it’s about regeneration, it’s about boosting sporting legacy, it’s about boosting business, it’s sustainable. All these things are absolute bullshit."

Moore, former director of the Architecture Foundation and editor of Blueprint magazine, made the statements as part of a wide-ranging interview with Dezeen to coincide with the publication of his new book, Why We Build (below). The book explores the forces - including hope, power, money and sex - that drive the creation of architecture.

"On the Olympics site they’re going to build about 12,000 homes and I think they’re going to make about a similar number of jobs," Moore added. "If you’re really saying you have to hold the Olympic Games in order to achieve the equivalent of a middle-sized market town in east London, that’s just daft. That’s not how you go around regenerating things."

More than 11,000 homes will be built on the site of the Olympic Park in the next 20 years, according to plans set out by the London Legacy Development Corporation, with the first new development made up of apartments converted from the Athletes' Village.

Moore added: "I think they’ve done a better job than most previous Olympics, but it’s really up in the air what happens next. It could be a great model for how to improve areas. I mean, people in Stratford say it’s given them pride in the place, so that’s great. The big question is whether we get the usual housebuilders moving in and doing their usual product and essentially creating private enclaves."

Moore also discussed The Shard (above), the 300 metre high skyscraper by Italian architect Renzo Piano, which opened above London Bridge Station in July this year.

"The contribution of it to its immediate surroundings is pretty minimal," Moore said. "You can be ten feet away from The Shard and if you’re looking away from it you wouldn’t know it was there.

"The Shard is clearly an icon, and it is very clearly a product of the last 10 years, in that it is by a famous architect, it’s a striking shape, it’s funded by Qatari money, it’s the sort of speculative building that was made possible by a planning culture in London that was very developer-friendly, very much about attracting investment."

Moore criticised the way the tower fails to interact with, or benefit, the surrounding area. "[It] is sort of amazing, and a serious failure of planning, that you could put that much investment into a place and not have a positive idea about what the whole place is going to be."

In an interview Dezeen published with Renzo Piano earlier this year, the architect claimed The Shard was designed to be "quite gentle". "I don’t think arrogance will be a character of this building," said Piano. "I think its presence will be quite subtle. Sharp but subtle."

Despite its failings, Moore admits the skyscraper has already become a popular addition to the skyline. "The principles behind it are all wrong, but it has captured people’s imagination and it has become part of the mental furniture of London in a way that I think is positive," he said.

"Also The Shard just proves that this stuff is going to go on forever – we’re always going to have Shards, always going to have Burj Khalifas, always going to have Chrysler Buildings, so there’s always going to be big money and it’s always going to build big buildings."

You can read an extract from Moore's new book, Why We Build, in our story published last month. The story also contains details of a competition to win a copy of the book, which closes tomorrow. A movie and transcript of the interview with Moore will be available soon.

Moore told Dezeen that the book explores "the interaction between architecture and human emotions and desires" and the failure of architects to understand how people actually inhabit buildings, and also draws attention to those architects who Moore believes "allow people to finish the story" of a building, such as the Brazilian modernist Lina Bo Bardi.

Dezeen's coverage of The Shard includes an interview with Renzo Piano and a movie of the building's construction.

Our London 2012 Olympics coverage includes Olympic architecture, Thomas Heatherwick's Olympic cauldron, reports on Paralympic design and our own medals for the best loved Olympic designs.

The post Olympic regeneration claims are "bullsh*t"
- Rowan Moore appeared first on Dezeen.

The movie by the V&A museum shows the forging of the 204 copper petals and the testing of the concentric mechanised stems that rise in simultaneously to bring the petals together and form the cauldron.

Above: 'Petal' prototype commissioned by LOCOG. Photograph by the V&A museum.

Dezeen filmed an interview with Heatherwick over a month before its unveiling on the top secret design at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

After its debut, Heatherwick was inundated with messages of support from people “moved by his spectacular creation”, the designer told the Independant.

The cauldron proved controversial during the games as it was hidden from most visitors to the Olympic Park and only visible to spectators attending events in the Olympic Stadium where it was kept.

Above: scale model of the Olympic cauldron. Photograph by the V&A museum.

A scale model and drawings of the cauldron are currently on display at the Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary exhibition at the V&A museum until 30 September 2012.

See all our stories about Thomas Heatherwick »
See all our stories about the London 2012 Olympics »

The post Making of Thomas Heatherwick's
London 2012 Olympic cauldron appeared first on Dezeen.