Of Montreal

Posted on July 13, 2011 by

After the establishment of the Committee d’Organisation des Jeux Olympique (COJO) in 1972, the body tasked with not just running the Olympic Games in Montreal but controversially to build the structures, the Canadian Ambassador for Argentina wrote to his superiors in Ottawa. After some pleasantries he made the following statement: “Let’s be frank and to the point. In Buenos Aires COJO means fuck.’ Furthermore, he pointed out that the acronym for the body established to deliver unified TV coverage of the games, Olympics Radio and Television Organsiation, ORTO, was in the same colloquial Spanish of urban Argentina, a word that would best be translated as asshole. He then detailed how exactly he was going to obfuscate the issue with Canada’s Latin American trading partners. Continue reading →

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The Pompidou Centre Inside Battersea Power Station

Posted on July 7, 2011 by

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A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part III, Race Resurfaces

Posted on June 23, 2011 by

As we have previously discussed, the Olympic Torch Relay was founded by the Nazi party in the 1936 to communicate an idea of racial hegemony . We have also seen that the Torch itself slowly became a means of showing off the technological prowess of the host nation. We shall see though that whilst the International Olympic Committee and the local organising committees of the Olympic Games following World War II all concentrated on the minutiaem they were unaware that through its very success as a cinematic or latterly televised spectacle the torch relay was evolving out of their control

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Reaching for My Revolver

Posted on June 21, 2011 by

Will Gompertz on the Today programme this morning said that the arts has “always been embedded in the idea of hosting the Olympics.’ As portions of the £80m Cultural Olympiad were officially announced – a group of artists to create posters, a weekend festival of classical music, loads of Shakespeare – Gompertz suggested that the arts have always been integral to the Olympics but that the Cultural Olympiad has had ‘minimum impact as a brand name.” What Gompertz didn’t really get though was that although their has been a relationship between arts and the Olympics it has always, always been unsatisfactory. Continue reading →

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All The People

Posted on June 16, 2011 by

Just a short walk north from the Olympic stadium, up a canal dug in the 1770s, is the Hackney Marshes. Unprepossessing on a weekday with the wind whipping in from the west, this site has in a fact become defined by a clash between the international and local role of sport: in a very different way to the Olympics perhaps but making some interesting parallels.

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Tadao Ando and his Secretive Champion.

Posted on June 12, 2011 by

Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s second permanent project in the UK may not be much – a water feature in Mayfair – but it reveals his special relationship with a hitherto little known patron of the arts.

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A Ballardian Shard?

Posted on May 27, 2011 by

This is a great documentary by the film-maker Simona Piantieri, which I contributed to. I think she gets a great range of voices who actually provide an insight into the building. I think I’ve modified my views on it as a consequence of watching. It helped me see beyond Renzo Piano’s spin to appreciate what a great building it might actually be.

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A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part II, The Torch as Technology

Posted on May 20, 2011 by

In the original series of Star Trek, there is an episode called ‘Who Mourns For Adonais’, in which Captain Kirk meets Apollo, who by the time of stardate 3468.1 is the last of the Greek Gods. He sports a glittering golden tunic and has learned how to jam phasers and hold the Enterprise in a force field. Kirk makes the interesting supposition that this figure, standing in a polystyrene temple is in fact the real Apollo and that the Greek gods were aliens that visited planet earth 5000 years ago. Apollo is spurned by the crew and at the end of the episode fades away bemoaning the fact that no-one believes in him anymore. This conjunction of the ancient and the modern is a staple of our popular culture but in terms of stage dressing be it for a TV science-fiction or an Olympic ceremony created for the camera, there are some very unique reasons why it is undertaken and why when it comes to the latter it must continually evolve.

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A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part I, Owning Antiquity

Posted on May 18, 2011 by

In the late 1950s, two British archaeologists made an important discovery whilst excavating at the ancient site of Delphi in Greece. Here, several hundred years before the birth of Christ a famous oracle had been established. During the classical period, it was believed to be the spot where Apollo despatched Python into a fissure in the rock and that furthermore Apollo spoke through this oracle there. Here the sibyl who was an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area would become intoxicated by the vapors emanating from the fissure. She would fall into a trance and allow Apollo to possess her spirit. Her ramblings would be divined by priests and the individual in search of his fate would receive advice. The foretelling of the oracle was frequently sought by the political leaders of Ancient Greece. In addition Delphi held games. Not as famous as the ones held at Olympia perhaps but they were popular. From 586 BC, every four years athletes from all over the Hellenic world would join in sporting events and musical competitions.

During their dig the two British archaeologists found a rock upon which was carved with a familir five-ringed insignia. The implications of their discovery of the Olympic rings at such an ancient site were surely huge. Until that time, it was commonly held that Pierre de Coubertin, the French pedagogue and founder of the Modern Olympics, had invented the insignia in 1912. Had the two British archaeologists discovered that the ancient Greeks and not Coubertin had come up with the five-ring device?

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Beyond Nations

Posted on May 9, 2011 by

Designed by a British architect and built by a British construction company, The British Antarctic Survey’s new research base, known as Halley VI, on the Brunt Ice Shelf is on one level an expression of the best in contemporary design from the UK. Approximately 1.2 metres of snow accumulate each year on the Brunt Ice Shelf and buildings on the surface become covered and eventually crushed by snow, necessitating periodic rebuilding of the station. This part of the ice shelf is also moving westward by approx. 700m per year.

This harsh environment was described in the brief for an international competition which was won by Hugh Broughton Architects who created a modular system of monocoque units on hydraulic jacks that can survive the most perilous of conditions.It is a typically bold move by the British Antarctic Survey: a fascinating, dynamic institution who has cleverly used architecture and design to further its aim to explore and scientifically examine the most uninhabitable corner of the globe.

Halley VI also represents the union between two of the most well regarded facets of the United Kingdom’s industry: design and scientific research. The Halley Research base was made famous by the British scientists who whilst working here in the 1980s made one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the modern age – the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer, which led directly to the banning of CFCs. Yet as the project manager for the complex construction of the base on a shifting ice flow told me: ‘the Antarctic is no place for jingoism.’

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