2012 Olympics & Lea Valley Masterplan

Location: London, United Kingdom

Client: London Development Agency

Date: 2012 Completion

Total Area: 215ha

Budget: Investment value £4 billion

Brief: Planning for infrastructure, transport and 11,000 homes plus waterway and open space strategies

Masterplan: EDAW, FOA, Allies & Morrison, HOK Sport, Buro Happold

Team credits: Up to the award to the games to London

FOA Partner in Charge: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi

Project Architect: Lluis Viu Rebes

Design Team: Lorena Camisuli, Eduardo Gutierrez, Chris Yoo, Joaquin Rigau

During the development phase:

FOA Partner in Charge: Farshid Moussavi

Project Architect: Friederich Ludewig, Terrence Seah, David Mah, Clara Oloriz, Sukyo Hong, Christian Wittmeir, Abraham Gordon, Kelvin Chu, Manuel Schmidt, James Khamsi

The London 2012 Olympic Park in the Lea Valley is designed around the concept of the Games in the Park, where sports venues would be placed within a green landscape as a continuation of the Lea Valley Park across the Thames and towards Greenwich. This introduces a huge regenerative potential to the Olympics as the construction of a large park requires the introduction of numerous pedestrian and vehicular bridges to tie together the different islands that constitute the Lea Valley and are presently disconnected, into a park. The new park will connect the surrounding communities, which are not able to communicate, and bring huge economical benefits through increased accessibility.

The landscape of the Olympic Park and Concourse is designed to enforce the exceptional spatial qualities present in the Lea Valley: the meandering of water canals and marshes and the winding roads and infrastructures. A braided grid acts as the organising structure weaving throughout the park, merging the Olympic venues with the concourse, existing canals, roads and new bridges introduced, making the existing spatial characteristics of the Lea Valley the very features of London Olympics and the Lea Valley Park. In order to avoid the conventional image of object-like structures deployed on a platform, all the Olympic venues propose to integrate the park within their enveloping surface so that they’re fundamentally determined by the context. Landscape as a consistent design element in all the venues will ensure that they produce a coherent whole post-Olympics rather than becoming a series of arbitrary structures.