London 2012 Olympic Park, London

The London 2012 Olympic Park in the Lea Valley is designed around the concept of the “Games in the Park”, with sports venues placed within a green landscape which is a continuation of the Lea Valley Park and crosses the Thames towards Greenwich. This strategy has huge post-Olympic regenerative potential since its construction requires the introduction of numerous pedestrian and vehicular bridges in order to tie together the Lea Valley’s different disconnected islands together, into a park.

The new park will connect its surrounding communities and bring huge economic benefits through increased accessibility. The landscape of the Olympic Park and Concourse is designed to enforce the exceptional spatial qualities present in the Lea Valley: the meandering water canals and marshes and the winding roads and infrastructure. A braided grid acts as an organizing structure which weaves throughout the park, merging the Olympic venues with Concourse, as well as the existing canals and roads and the new bridges, and thereby turning the spatial characteristics of the Lea Valley into the very features of London Olympics and the Lea Valley Park. In order to avoid the conventional image of object-like structures deployed on a platform, all the venues were required to integrate the park within their enveloping surface so that they are determined fundamentally by the context. Using landscape as a consistent design element in all the venues ensured that the venues produce a coherent whole, post-Olympics, rather than a series of arbitrary structures.