Sports infrastructure

par John BARROW

25 janvier 2012 - Londres

Télécharger la présentation (anglais uniquement).pdf

I will just give you a little trip through my experience as an architect designing sports stadiums, and I know I have many colleagues in the audience who will probably yawn at some of this.  We have been doing this for 28 years, and through that experience I think we have learned a few tricks.  The tricks are that we have to view these stadiums, these arenas, these sport facilities, as a very long term commitment to each community, so when we are talking about London 2012 Olympics, we are talking about something which will be there for 50-100 years.  Therefore, what we do now and what we did in the past is extremely important to the success of those things in the long term.
Just think that the capital cost of these facilities represents a very small percentage of their overall running and revenue generation during their 50-year lifetime, in fact it probably represents about 10%, so we need to think very clearly about the other 90% of that equation, and how we can make it work, how we can ensure that these things do not become white elephants, that they really are a catalyst for our younger generations.  These facilities need to be open door stadiums, to be things that reach out into the community, and are used every day of the week, not just sitting there for the special occasion or the odd event. 
I started work on the London Olympic bid right at the bid stage, and we developed the master plan together with the master planning team.  That master plan incorporated a lot of this thinking; it incorporated a lot of the Legacy design in principle.  Therefore, we were trying to lay down the foundations for what is now being discussed by the OPLC as the defined legacy of this Olympics.  We are spending GBP9.3 billion of taxpayers’ money on our Olympics, and we need to get it right.  I think we have, and I think we have set a whole new bar, a whole new benchmark, for future Olympics in the way that we have approached this. 
Populous, my company, which used to be called HOK Sport in those days, is just one small cog in this massive machine of thousands of people contributing to the success of these Games.  This is going to be our year, because we started this process ten years ago; we started on the bid in 2003 and before, so our objective during that time was not only to get involved in the bid and the master plan, but also to develop our theory of sustainable stadiums and arenas in some of the actual venues.  Therefore, we were very lucky to become the designers of the main stadium, and we also became the second designers for the handball arena.
More importantly, though, was the winning of the overlay.  Overlay, as we describe it, is all the things that you need to put on the big event, all those things like extra security facilities, the media, the extra players’ facilities, extra security compounds and so on.  Those things represent probably as much as the actual stadium itself in terms of area, and they are very, very important in a situation like we have here, where our temporary facilities represent as many as the three previous Olympics combined.  Therefore, if you take Sydney, Athens and Beijing, the number of temporary facilities in each of those Olympics is represented by what we are doing right here in London?
Why are we doing that?  The previous speakers said a lot about why.  It is also to do with sustainability; basically, we wanted to make sure that our stadiums were not white elephants in the future, so that, if they are not any use in the legacy mode, we take them away.  There are some fundamental things, though: it also allowed us to take a view on our historic fabric, such as places like Horse Guards Parade, world famous, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.  The centre of the world existed in Greenwich once, and the International Date Line exists there.  The Royal Naval College, which really was the heart of the British Empire, exists there, so we have a proposal to put the equestrian events right in there, using the old Queen’s house and using the backdrop of those famous buildings as part of the entrance experience; it is going to be fabulous. 
All in all, it contributes to our ability to put on a very lightweight Olympics, and here is the difference between previously and now.  We have learned a lot from Sydney, and as was said previously, Sydney was our previous benchmark.  We learned from the legacy design of Sydney, which is some places was very good; the Stadium we designed was designed to be eminently flexible, compactable after the event so that it matched the performance space required for things like rugby and Australian rules football. 
However, what was missed was the fine grained fabric of the Olympic Park itself, and it is only just now starting to come into place over ten years later, and that fine fabric was what was described before as the intermediate development within the Olympic Park to create a community which the begins to own those facilities; that is so important. 
Let us move on.  The essence of this is our belief that these sporting facilities can be the heart of the whole community, that they can reach out to things like health and education plus other events to make this a true hub for the future.  For example, there is a project we designed for the Nanjing City Council back in 2006 for the China Games which were held before the Olympics.  Nanjing is the old capital of China, so they really wanted to show that they could put on something fabulous.  It was a complete sports city with a 60,000 seat stadium, an indoor basketball arena, an Olympic standard pool hall and many other training facilities, which were assembled in downtown Nanking, and it became a huge success for the community too.  It is used by thousands of people every day, but the important part of this legacy story is, it enabled them to win the new Youth Olympics in 2014, so a whole new part of Nanjing is being built, literally as we speak, creating the new athletes’ village and other venues.  The great story is that that will just go on and on, that part of this legacy story is not about reducing everything down and making it cuddly for the local community.  It is also anticipating that some time in the future London will put on a great event again, so we need to pump it back up again, and that is why it is important to design in flexibility in these facilities.
It gets much more difficult when it comes to something like the Winter Olympics, because in Sochi in Russia, where the Winter Olympics will take place in 2014, we had to design a master plan which not only anticipated a complete new city, but was also able to develop a whole new university institute of sport, which will in turn use many of the facilities.  During that process it became abundantly clear that the London story became very relevant, because we convinced the organising committee to change many of the facilities which were originally planned as permanent to temporary.  Therefore, once again there is a great story here of a very compact Olympics which will be the seed for regenerating this part of the Russian resort along the coast of the Black Sea in Sochi, and which will contribute towards a whole new version of a sports institute for Russia.  Therefore, not only will it be able to hold the World Cup in 2018, but it can also be transformed down to a smaller size for the local and national team training, and in itself it becomes an icon for this part of the world. 
It is a very delicate structure, showing how we attempted to achieved something which was very lightweight, very functional, and in so doing, beautiful.  The creed in there which is beginning to emerge is that it should be highly sustainable and can be used for aspiring nations and cities for future events like these.  When it comes to London, I just wanted to carry on the thread of thought; when we designed the master plan, and when we designed the facilities such as the main stadium, our chief ambition was to touch the ground lightly, to embrace temporary, to really try to create a whole new architectural language around that theme, because, as was said earlier, London does not need to showcase itself, everybody knows where London is, and this is probably doing a sustainable Olympics seriously for the very first time.
When you look at the Olympic Park, it is very compact; it is designed with an elongated doughnut pattern so that it is easy for servicing.  When you look at it, the spectators are in the centre, and we have over half a million spectators going through that Park every day, but there is a distinct line between front of house and back of house, as we call it, so that we have ease of servicing and ease of access by the athletes around the edges of the Park.  It is very, very important not only to reduce costs but also to create the right environment for the Olympics. 
Therefore, having made it so compact, we have probably given ourselves a challenge so that spectator security and crowd movement control all becomes very critical.  Therefore, as we went through the process we have ensured that all of the 33 bridges and transport interchanges work together in harmony to create a fantastic but safe environment.  Only four of the mainstream facilities remain on the site in their true form, and the rest go.  Here is an interesting comparison: the Beijing Olympics were great, and they had lots more money than us, but looking at the Beijing Olympic Park you can see the difference; the idea of compactness begins to emerge when you see the London Olympic Park in comparison. 
It makes it better for everyone; it is easier to get to for the athletes, it is a great environment for the spectators, with a feeling of festival, and there is a feeling of human scale, which is very important.  Therefore, as we go through time, the fine grained pattern of the Legacy plan could be developed within the Olympic Park to create that community I mentioned, so mixed uses, residential and business, will all start to arrive where we have taken the temporary venues away; it is very important.   We learned in Sydney’s case that this is a 10-15 year plan, and this has been mentioned already; it is at least that, and may be 30 years, but this is something which will drive success through this part of London for the future. 
We were the architects for Wembley with Foster and Partners, and in direct comparison with Stade de France, it is pretty similar; it is a national stadium, it has no home team, but what it does have is 200,000 square metres for things like conventions, offices and, most particularly, restaurants, so we have a fabulous opportunity to wine and dine people both before and after the events, which helps reduce crowding and, of course, increases revenue.  We have all the normal things you would expect, sweets and so forth, but these areas, the restaurant areas in particular, are extremely important to the success of a stadium like this.  We have 62 major events per year, less than half of which are actually football events, the rest being entertainment of one sort or another.  It is extremely successful as a national stadium, but what is missing at the moment is the surrounding development, which we hope will take place in a ten year plan.
Laying down the foundations of these things helps you win Olympics in the future, so when it comes to our famous Wimbledon, just by putting a retractable roof over the centre court of Wimbledon, it enabled us to extend its use not just from the Wimbledon fortnight, but it is also, like Wembley, one of our Olympic venues, so we have built in event certainty just with that one technological achievement. 
I wanted to talk about Lyon.  We have been working on this one for about eight years now, and VINCI have won the contract to build it.  This is a very special stadium for me, because the client is so enlightened that the first thing he did was to come to England to look at a Stade Anglais, and the first one he looked at was Arsenal, so we were delighted to show him around, and he said, ‘This is magnificent, I like it, but I want an Arsenal Plus, I want a better Arsenal.  I want a Paul Bocuse restaurant on every level.  I want the whole environment to be better, and I want the outside of my stadium to work every day.’  Given that this site is on the outer ring road, it is absolutely essential that it works that way, that this becomes a destination in its own right, not just during the event day, for matches, but for every other day, so people just come out here to enjoy things like outdoor markets and son et lumière performances which enliven the outer space, so that it opens its doors.
There is also its training ground which we have designed right next door, so you can imagine that the local kids have the opportunity to look at the training grounds, see their heroes, maybe participate themselves, and then go into the big venue for the real match.  This actually informs the architecture very strongly, by creating a sense of place around the outside edge of the stadium, which is activated by many things from visual cues to actual events.  All of that was learned from Arsenal. 
The greatest success story of them all came from the same team that designed the Olympic Stadium; McAlpine were the contractors, Buro Happold were the engineers, and Populous the architects, and it was built on time and on budget but with a fantastic appetite for business.  This was the first time a club had really tackled the idea of corporate hospitality in a big way, so over 15% of the audience capacity is devoted to corporate hospitality of one sort or another, and in the process they have increased their revenue by 300% since they left Highbury, their old ground.  They also have the benefit of a huge amount of development around them, including commercial, restaurants and residential.  It is a great story, a very compact site, and it shows that these things can and should fit in your downtown locations.  We do not necessarily want them on the ring roads, though that was a necessity in Lyon; we want them in town, because that is where your transportation hubs are.
 Coming on to perhaps the biggest success story of them all, which started off as a complete reverse of that, the Millennium Dome was built to celebrate the year 2000 and left empty afterwards, so we came along with another enlightened client, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), and we created a venue inside that existing tent which is focused around a 23,000 capacity arena for everything.  This is a concert based arena, but it also handles sport, it will be one of our Olympic venues for things like basketball and gymnastics, but it is a true destination.  Over eight million people walk through the door every year, and the revenue is GBP405 million per year, so this is the most successful venue in the world, and it has been for the last four years since it opened, beating all the American and European arenas.  It is number one, and it is a very simple and also a very lucrative formula, because our client has probably recouped all his money already.  The naming rights alone paid for pretty much all the capital cost, as they more or less did on Arsenal, so you begin to see a different picture.  This is not just sport, but sport, entertainment and business, all beautifully encapsulated in one thing. 
It is second to none as a regenerator for the Greenwich peninsula, and that regeneration has begun to take place, with new offices, a new university and, of course, lots to follow; that will take 15-20 years.  However, London has benefited enormously from this particular facility; being one of the best in the world, it has attracted so many different types of events that it has really put London on the international map.  I would like to think Paris will do the same thing in due course. 
There is great attention to detail in terms of special spaces for people, one example being an area where you can go into as long as you have an O2 phone, as you get a special code if you are a subscriber.  Those little treats help to make people spend lots of money, and I hate to sound so commercial, but that it how it is. 
We now come to the Olympic Stadium, probably one of our biggest challenges yet.  It sits on its own island, and we took advantage of that.  We had an incredibly challenging brief to incorporate flexibility, to reduce it from 80,000 to 25,000, because you simply do not need that sort of seating capacity for athletics; that is written into our bid, and that is what we will do.  We have been fortunate to win the World Athletics Championship in 2017, and the legacy of the stadium is now under discussion.  We will know in due course what exactly the combination of things will be, but it is a very exciting opportunity to use that stadium as the centrepiece of the Olympic Park, and also to combine an international event scenario using the stadium and the O2 Arena. 
We were true to the brief of making it reducible, as everything above the concrete level is demountable and made generally of steel construction.  We used some recycled steel, and achieved something like 42% recyclability of the entire stadium in the process.  We crowned the stadium with a cable supported fabric roof, and the outside facade will also be fabric wrapped.  There is a fabulous view inside in a very compact stadium, and just to give you a feel for that, I will give you a size comparison.  Not to be derogatory about Beijing, what we managed to achieve was about half the size, and that helps enormously, not only from the spectators’ point of view, because they are much closer to the action, but also from the athletes’ point of view, because they feel that everyone is right there, so it has the benefit of being extremely compact but with the same capacity. 
The interesting stories for me, heading up the overlay team, are these.  One example which has caught the public imagination is beach volleyball held in Horse Guards Parade; it is a young people’s support, it is something which is highly charged, and it has a fantastic backdrop of all our historic buildings, just a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace.  The complication is that we have to build this thing within six weeks after the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, so it will be a hell of a task, but there we are.
This does not just happen to be a new build story.  There is a refurbished railway warehouse in Dublin which is famous for being the nursery for bands like U2; it is called the O2, but U2 played there.  We had the task of refurbishing this arena as part of the regeneration of the Dublin Docklands, and we have done so with an entirely different sort of arena.  This is a fan-shaped arena, rather like your Zenith concept in France but much, much bigger.  We can hold everything from major concerts to looking after our corporate hospitality guests, we make lots of money and it is highly flexible. 
The story goes on to things like Formula One.  I know the French Grand Prix is under discussion right now.  How do you do something in Formula One which is purportedly sustainable?  One example is a building we constructed last year for the British Grand Prix which incorporates all of their facilities, corporate hospitality, race control, the pits for the cars, but all of the permanent structure is in one big, long building, 400 metres long, and that is it.  The rest of the building on the site is entirely demountable, entirely temporary, so you get this interesting balance between permanent and temporary, which creates a great opportunity to get the business case right.
It can be simple: this story extends to simple training centres like this one in Ravenscraig in Scotland, which after all is just a shed.  It is very cost effective but with a little architectural flair and a little sustainability thrown in.  The entire north wall opens up and allows natural ventilation and lighting from the north, and a series of roof lights which light up the entire facility without costing a lot in electricity.  That is the sort of story I love, because we get over 1,000 kids per day going through that door, and they are training alongside their heroes; we have the national team training there too, but the little kids are just going to be right there for the future for us. 
Therefore, this is the story I wanted to paint for London 2012.  We think it is a benchmark for all future Olympics, we really do, and many of the team members would agree that that is what we have achieved, on time, under budget.