36 C O N T E X T 1 2 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 2 never regained its position or glamour. In 1936 it was destroyed by a fire which started in the women’s cloakroom. London’s Millennium Dome, designed by architects the Richard Rogers Partnership and engineers Buro Happold, is similar to Crystal Palace in many ways. Both Crystal Palace and the Millennium Dome were erected as temporary exhibition buildings for a specific purpose – Crystal Palace to house the Great Exhibition and the Millennium Dome to celebrate the start of the new millennium. Both were the largest buildings of their type in the world when built, and both were vastly more expensive than the original predictions. According to the National Audit Office the final cost of the dome was £789 million. Just as with Crystal Palace in Sydenham, visitor numbers for the dome were overestimated. Of the expected 12 million visitors during the millennium year, only 6.5 million materialised, leaving a vast overspend, and a sickening sense of failure and waste. When the millennium celebrations had finished and the dome closed its doors, the government, as with Crystal Palace, was left with the embarrassing question of what to do with this vastly expensive building with no obvious use. Given the enormous amount of money which had been poured into it, this was a question which should have been addressed at the conception stage of design. Many ideas concerning the dome’s future were put forward as the millennium year drew to a close, including the idea that it be used as a temporary football pitch. None of these came to anything and it was some considerable time before the dome’s future was finally decided. Of course the dome has now been renamed and restyled as the O₂ Arena, having taken over the functions of the closed London Arena. But this future was only secured five years after the millennium when it was bought by the Anshutz Entertainment Group and finally re-opened in 2007 as flexible entertainment space. The dome’s story has yet to run to its end: no one knows what its fate will be on the expiry of its originally predicted lifespan of 25 years. If the dome grows in popularity between now and 2025, will there be the finance, to say nothing of the necessary goodwill, to repair and retain it? The adventures of both Crystal Palace and the Millennium Dome should be important reminders to us of the need to plan for the future of the temporary 2012 Olympics events buildings. Some of these amazing new structures do have planned futures and uses but, as yet, the details and predictions concerning these futures seem a little woolly. The Olympic Park, which houses most of the new events buildings, is to be renamed the Queen Elizabeth Park in 2013 when it will be re-opened. It will be one of the largest urban parks in Europe. Various press releases have announced that a new sports and technology university will be opened to make use of the avant-garde sporting facilities currently being finalised.With regard to some of the individual buildings in the Olympic Park, the London Aquatics Centre expects to replace the pools at the National Sports Centre in south London, while the Hand-Ball Arena, also within the park, is to be adapted to a multi-sports arena for community use, athletics training and smaller events. The already iconic Velodrome is to be retained for community use as well as for elite athletes. In theory this all sounds worthwhile but is there really a need for facilities on this scale? Is there a genuine need for another university in London? And are there really enough cyclists in the local community to make a sustained use of the Olympic Velodrome? Perhaps, once again, there has been an overoptimistic estimate of the reality of the post-Olympic park visitor numbers, the number of sports facility users in the local community and the predicted, new university students, all of whom will be required in droves to justify the retention of what were designed to be one-off, single- purpose buildings. The Olympic Park will also be home to the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a steel tower to be used as a viewing platform for the whole park. This, currently under construction, will be Britain’s largest piece of public art. Costing a total of £19.1 million, the project has been praised for its boldness but also condemned as a vanity project that will be of limited use. Criticism of the tower may be short-sighted when one considers the Eiffel Tower in France, which was constructed only as a temporary building, to be the entrance arch to theWorld Fair of 1889. Today the Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world and an icon of France. It was Boris Johnson and Tessa Jowell’s suggestion in 2008 that the Olympic Park ‘needed something more’. This decision, resulting in the ArcelorMittal Orbit, may turn out to have been inspired. Only time will tell. The only really sure outcome is the proposal to convert the Olympic Village to 3,600 new apartments. This is likely to be successful, if only due to the lack of new homes being built more generally. Whether the Olympic Park can be made to work as a profitable, useful venture after the event for which it was designed is yet to be seen. This will show whether we are getting any better at planning for the future of our amazing, yet costly, public exhibition buildings. Carole Fry, a director of AHC Consultants The Eiffel Tower, a temporary building constructed for theWorld Fair of 1889 is now the world’s most-visited paid monument.
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