iblog

Designs for London’s new Olympic stadium have been unveiled. As the picture on the left shows, the centrepiece will be a giant sporting bowl which will have seats for an audience of 80,000 and the stadium will be located in Stratford, in East London. Construction will begin next April in order to be ready a year in advance of the events.

Apparently the costs of the stadium will be a huge £496 million even though the previous budget stated £280 million. Many feel uncomfortable with the idea of this much being spent for a singular construction, but budgeters have reassured everyone that after the Olympics the top tier of seats will be lifted off and the stadium will be able to be used as a standard sports venue with 25,000 seats.

The stadium has been designed by HOK Sport, the same architects who designed other world-famous sports venues such as Sydney Olympic stadium and Wembley stadium. Chair of the Organising Committee, also a former Olympic champion, is excited about the project and thinks the plans for the stadium are modern and practical. He says:

“It’s a stadium that delivers on everything we said we would deliver on: a stadium with track and field as its primary legacy; a stadium that will be reduced from 80,000 seats in Olympic mode to a 25,000-seater community base.”

Though I’m no huge sports fan, I’m glad the excitement and patriotism for 2012 is still going strong, especially after the embarrassing and shocking logo (which, we are reminded, will not change despite thousands of protests). However, I am reluctant to believe that the design for the stadium will melt many hearts - after all, it IS essentially an unwarranted sum of money to pay for what looks like a very bogstandard and uninspiring stadium. It seems that the organisers behind 2012 want to emphasise coolness and youthfulness in everything they produce (see the promotional video for yet more of the same). Yet ironically this is what is making the young people cringe most!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 1:52 am and is filed under Entertainment, Travel, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.