As London prepares to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, plans for a temporary basketball stadium that can be removed after the event are offering a new way to look at the event and its potential for creating venues with no long-term usability.
The design idea could change the Olympic Games' reputation for creating "white elephants" in host cities.
"The structure, designed by Wilkinson Eyre architects and the KSS design group, might look flamboyant, yet its "Meccano" construction, as Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority has described it, ensures that it can be deconstructed after the Games, with much of it reused. Its 12,000 plastic seats seem destined for Silverstone and other sporting venues, while the external structure may be shipped to Brazil for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
It is not too hard, then, to imagine a future Olympics held in temporary and reusable buildings. Not only would this save cities from debt, redundant venues and white elephant awards, it would also mean that the Games could be held in those with precious little money to throw away. A low-cost travelling Olympics could tour the world, taking in cities that might gain greatly from the event but could never begin to think of the equivalent of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre at Stratford. Could we yet see an Addis Ababa, Dhaka or Havana Olympics?"
FULL STORY: London 2012: The flatpack Olympics
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The Olympics can be awesome for cities. Or they can be devastating. Rarely they're both, and most often they are an economic drain caused by over-investment in facilities with limited long-term usability. So when London's plans for a 2012 Summer Olympics stadium that would reduce from 80,000 seats during the games to a more realistically usable 25,000 seats after, Olympics experts, city officials and taxpayers rejoiced. But recent news has turned that rejoice to disgust.
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