Taken from Azure Magazine (Canada), September issue. Article by Will Jones
London aims to break records with its sustainability plans for the 2012 Summer Olympics. With less than a year to go, are those ambitious goals still on track?
"Fundamentally, I believe staging the Olympics is unsustainable," says Shaun McCarthy, chair of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 and a man known for his straight talk. He is heading up the Olympics' independent environmental watchdog, the first of its kind. He considers himself the "critical friend" to both the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) and the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and his job is to ensure the Games go down in history as the greenest ever - a goal that seemed almost impossible from the get-go. "Constructing lots of new buildings and then flying people around the world to put on a one-time sporting event can be seen as environmentally irresponsible," he says matter-of-factly, "unless - and this is a big ask - we can demonstrate that the net good outstrips the damage we cause."
London won the bid largely on its green promises, including the ambitious plan to regenerate a 202-hectare swath of the city's East End into space for living, working and parkland. Out of this wasteland has risen a spectacular development with three state-of-the-art stadiums - the Olympic Stadium by Populous, Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre and the Velodrome by Hopkins Architects - plus three other multi-purpose arenas, two of which are temporary and will be relocated after the Games.
There is also the athletes' village, designed by 15 teams of architects, and an international media centre by Allies & Morrison. These developments will be converted, post-Olympics, into 2,800 new homes and a business complex. And there is a new train link to central London, along with a host of cycling routes, pedestrian footpaths and canals.
According to the ODA, construction should reach an environmental standard 15 per cent higher than required by U.K. building regulations. It's a high-stakes goal that includes reusing or recycling 90 per cent of all demolition materials, designing to minimize carbon dioxide output, and employing and training some 2,250 tradespeople. With less than a year to go, is London's sustainable mission reaching the gold standard, or is it trailing at the back of the pack?
"We've got good and bad examples," says McCarthy of the site's primary architecture. He cites the Velodrome by Hopkins Architects as highly sustainable, lightweight and efficient. Its concave roof, constructed from a double-curving cable net structure, weighs less than half what the one on the Velodrome at the 2008 Games in Beijing did. Seating for 6,000 split into lower and upper tiers allows for a 360-degree concourse level in between, which features a continuous ribbon of full-height windows for natural cross-ventilation.