The seven runners-up for the Olympic Velodrome - images

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24 August 2007


The ODA has released images of the other seven schemes on the shortlist for the 2012 Velodrome, won by Hopkins last month



The 2012 Olympic Velopark is one of the “big four” architectural projects for the Games, and one of its most prestigious commissions. In a competition that saw the world’s premier architects battle it out, Hopkins eventually clinched the job last month.
This week the ODA releases images for the first time of all seven runners-up. Dominique Perrault’s flying saucer design features a disk-like roof form. Faulkner Browns and Thomas Heatherwick take the spinning wheel for their inspiration, while Foreign Office Architects envisages a geometrically-patterned dome.
"It was their strong synthesis of architecture and engineering, that won Hopkins the job"

Sunand Prasad explains the Velodrome jury's decision to choose Hopkins' design over the other seven shortlisted.
"It was a tremendous honour to be involved in the jury to select a winning design team for the London 2012 VeloPark and play a small part in helping shape one of the key venues.
In the world of design and architecture, competition has often produced the best results and the shortlist that emerged for the VeloPark promised an outstanding outcome. Eight world class teams submitted designs and through their skill and imagination set us a tough selection task. The importance and high profile of the venue– the Olympic stage in 2012 and a key element of the legacy the Games will leave – compounded the difficulty in selecting a winner.
Our search was focussed on choosing a winning team not a winning scheme – to choose a team for their collective experience, enthusiasm, expertise and ideas as well as their designs. The high quality of entries is demonstrated by the concept designs illustrated here which cannot show the deeper and more detailed aspects probed in depth by the jury. The jury was guided by a separate technical advisory panel which had considered matters including sustainability, cost and buildability in advance.
The site for the velopark straddles the urban context of the future edge of Stratford City and the Olympic Legacy Park. The jury was looking for a design that was capable of responding to this dual context, that would make sense as a place both when full of an Olympic crowd and in its later life hosting a local event, that would integrate with the outdoor circuits and the park through fine landscape design and that was rooted in the experience of competitors and spectators. The following brief descriptions cannot do justice to the depth of thought in the designs but aim to give a glimpse of what impressed the jury
- David Morley Architects scheme addressed well the integration the buildings into the parkland context while skilfully addressing both Games-time and Legacy requirements. The team gave great thought to the spectator and cyclist experience and produced an innovative way of bringing spectators close to the action.

- David Chipperfield Architects produced a strong urban response with an elegant vision of the building creating a civic plaza to provide public space for events and anchoring the design to the place
- Foreign Office Architects’ scheme had amongst the strongest of visual concepts based on the idea of a spinning geometrical pattern, which embraced the dome of the venue as well as the landscape. The structural design, based on a rim and spoke idea, extended the cycling metaphor to the interior
- FLACQ’s was one of two schemes that spotted the potential of reconfiguring the site to make a better response to the wider urban context. This produced strong links to Stratford City and articulated the venue as a ‘hinge' in the overall park setting giving it the right prominence
- Wilkinson Eyre Architects design narrative, and technically accomplished proposal celebrated cycling and the elliptical and undulating geometry of the track giving even the enfolding concourse a dynamic and even cinematic quality
- Dominique Perrault’s team took a strongly topographical approach extending the landscape to the roof with its elemental, disk like form. The design proposed a new public square, and pushed the idea of merging public place with sports activities.
- Faulkner Brown’s partnership with Thomas Heatherwick produced a striking and poetic concept in which the entire building took on the beautiful hand-crafted material quality of the wooden cycle track and expressed the spinning and wheeling motion of the race.
After a lengthy discussion the Hopkins Architects team emerged victorious, having impressed the jury with their strong synthesis of architecture and engineering, thorough understanding of the competition brief, and a simple but wonderful diagram that connected the activity inside with the landscape while bringing panoramic distant views of London into the arena. Particularly impressive was their resolution of the demands of the Olympics and Legacy use. Identifying the Olympics as the 'house warming party' for wider regeneration, the team, clearly passionate about cycling, focused on how the longer-term development could promote of sport
I stood for the RIBA presidency in part to promote the message that architectural excellence makes an enormous difference to people’s lives. Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre, Adams and Sutherland’s Greenway and now Hopkins’ Velopark hold the promise that the 2012 Olympics will demonstrate what great architectural and landscape design can do and go on doing long after long after the Olympic flame leaves London in 2012."

Fonte: bdonline