area 122 | sustainable way

location: Stratford (Lower Lea Valley)

year: 2012

The imminent arrival of the Olympics 2012, whose opening ceremony is scheduled for the forthcoming 27 July, will represent the first phase of the ambitious upgrading works planned by the municipal administration of London for the docklands in East London, one of the country‘s poorest areas which cover about a hundred hectares of ground, formerly characterized by serious environmental degradation.
The XXX Olympics therefore not only represent the organization of a great sports event in which the performance of thousands of athletes from all over the world compete; it also offers the hosting country, England, an opportunity to test a new way to conceive territorial transformation and upgrading by means of strategies that centre on respect for the environment and the reduction of energy consumption and consequently polluting emissions.
London 2012 wants to demonstrate, for the first time, the possibility to dilate the concept of eco-sustainability on the scale of the landscape, defining new standards of efficiency and new models of behaviour in organizing and guiding the choices of urban regeneration and renewal. In this perspective the BS 8901, a series of regulations and standards, were issued in 2007 by an interdisciplinary group formed of organizers, consultants, experts on events and sustainability; they provide the organizers of events and happenings with a high environmental and media impact with an aid towards the development of an advanced and sustainable management system through a long-term and equilibrated approach to economic activities, environmental responsibilities and social progress.

the five key themes of the sustainability plan
With the Olympics 2012 London makes a record, namely that of creating an event entirely conceived and realized according to the most exacting parameters of respect for the environment and eco-sustainability. The programme presented by the Organizing Committee in 2005 for the candidature already posed sustainability as a central issue of the whole project, extending the respect for these criteria and the consequent strategies to all the operators and parties involved, for various reasons, in the realization of the event. The project guidelines have been summarized in five points: combating climatic change, reducing waste, enhancing biodiversity, promoting inclusion and improving healthy living.
The planned works have obviously involved many different sectors, but the key word for everyone, sustainability, has become the centre and driving power of every activity, from food to transports, from logistics to ceremonies, from technology to concrete realizations.
Not just the buildings, but the whole Olympic Games as an event represent an example of a way of operating with a low impact on the environment.

1. climate change
“To deliver a low carbon Games and showcase how we are adapting to a world increasingly affected by climate change.”
Most activities associated with building and hosting the London 2012 Games incur a ‘carbon cost’.
Our challenge is to understand how these emissions arise, work to minimise them, mitigate their impact and plan for adapting to the effects of climate change so that our buildings, infrastructure and lifestyles are fit
for the long term.

2. biodiversity
“To conserve biodiversity, create new urban green spaces and bring people closer to nature through sport and culture.”
London 2012 is committed to ensuring that the Games play their part by taking a responsible attitude to the management of natural resources, through direct enhancements to the valuable ecology of the Lower Lea Valley and London 2012 venues in the capital and across the UK, and by promoting the value of the natural environment and conservation throughout the UK and international sport sectors.

3. inclusion
“To host the most inclusive Games to date by promoting access, celebrating diversity and facilitating the physical, economic and social regeneration of the Lower Lea Valley and surrounding communities.”
The London 2012 Games will be everyone’s Games. London’s bid was founded on a celebration of the diversity of London’s and the UK’s population. London 2012 is committed to making sure that everyone can participate in, and benefit from, the Games and their legacy. This is a unique opportunity for the UK
to demonstrate its rich diversity and social cohesion to an international audience and to promote the values
of openness, respect and fair play.

4. waste
“To deliver a zero waste Games, through exemplary resource management practices and by promoting long-term behavioural change.”
London 2012 seeks to optimise the opportunities to design out waste, while maximising the re-use and recycling of material arising during demolition, remediation and construction of the venues, as well as during the Games themselves. The Games and the lead-up to them present an opportunity to inspire change in waste management practices in the events and construction sectors.

5. healthy living
“To inspire people across the UK to take up sport and develop more active, healthy and sustainable lifestyles.”
Living healthy lifestyles, within the resources of the planet, is an essential element of working towards a one planet 2012. Some of the greatest health benefits that we can achieve are those that are within our own control: by eating well, engaging in physical activity and living in a healthy environment, we can improve our quality of life, our well-being and our happiness. London 2012 is committed to maximising the health.
benefits that the Games programme will bring – to spectators, to our workforce, to the whole of the UK.

Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) themes

The weeks of records and great sports events of the summer of 2012 will give the whole world an opportunity to appreciate not only the characteristic organizational and logistic ability of the Anglo-Saxon world, but also the cultural and technological level attained by a city as that of London, along with the actual efficiency and concreteness of the new living standards and environmental quality reached as a result of strict compliance with the latest criteria of sustainability and eco-compatibility.
On the basis of the five key points of the general program of London 2012, the ODA (Olympic Delivery Authority) has developed and fine-tuned its own specific sustainability strategy through 12 themes and issues (listed in the table on the next page): carbon dioxide emission, water, waste, materials, biodiversity, environmental impact, support community, transports and mobility, accesses, occupation and business, health and wellness, inclusion.

The ODA has successfully embedded sustainability using the following 12 themes of the SDS:

1. Carbon
– minimise carbon emissions associated with the Olympic Park and venues.

2. Water
– optimise opportunities for efficient water use, re-use and recycling.

3. Waste
– implement reduction of waste through design, while maximising
the re-use and recycling of materials during demolition, remediation and construction.

4. Materials
– identify, source and use environmentally and socially responsible materials.

5. Biodiversity
– protect and enhance the biodiversity and ecology of the Lower Lea Valley, and other venue locations.

6. Environmental impacts
– optimise positive and minimise adverse impacts on land, water, noise and air quality.

7. Supporting communities
– create new, safe, mixed-use public space, housing and facilities appropriate to the demographics and character of the Lower Lea Valley; make them adaptable to future climates.

8. Transport and mobility
– prioritise walking, cycling and the use of public transport to and within the Olympic Park and venues.

9. Access
– create a highly accessible Olympic Park and venues through the use of inclusive design.

10. Employment and business
– create new employment and business opportunities locally, regionally and nationally.

11. Health and well-being
– provide healthy lifestyle opportunities in the design and construction of the Olympic Park and venues.

12. Inclusion
– involve, communicate, and consult effectively with stakeholders and the diverse communities surrounding the Olympic Park and venues.

Every theme, every topic had to be, and has been, responded to in the form of a design activity aimed at maximizing the possible results, in a conviction that there is no optimal method identified a priori towards achieving the desired social and environmental well-being, but an organized, coordinated and programmed series of actions that may be infinitesimal in terms of environmental influence, but which together make it possible to achieve absolutely significant and relevant values in terms of quality and environmental sustainability.
The Olympic park designed by the EDAW consortium formed by Buro Happold, Foreign Office Architects, Populous, Allies and Morrison in cooperation with Arup and Atkins is proof that this kind of approach and goals do not inhibit the expressive and compositive potentials of the architectural and landscaped aggregate but that, quite on the contrary, when expertly coordinated, these themes are a source of creative inspirations that represent, in addition to the essence of the system software, an integral part of a hardware powered by an ethical dimension that alters its values and thus its appreciation, beyond the mere judgment of the morphological aggregate of the project. When the sports event is concluded, the Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) will hand the heritage of the Olympic Park – which will change name to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – to the city by means of a company, the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), which will provide for the management of the whole area located east of London for the next 25-30 years; this strategy is referred to as the heritage plan.
During his conference: “Olympics: starting with London: errors not to repeat” held in Rome in 2010 Ricky Burdett underscored that the whole project has been conceived so as not to repeat the post-event vicissitudes that have characterized the precedents of Athens, where the Olympic Park has remained a mainly deserted area after the games, or Beijing, where most of the built structures were not bought by the city as facilities serving the community. The solitary and futile fate of The Nest, the wonderful stadium designed by Herzog & de Meuron, seems that of an extraordinary monument to waste and to lack of planning, because the enormous costs incurred certainly cannot be justified by the “twenty days of glory” of the games in 2008.
The carefully planned sustainability of the London program on the contrary consists of creating a new residential urban reality served by adequate sports facilities and social services, connected by a prioritized and new mobility system with a low environmental impact, interspersed by green areas, for a socially and economically diversified community.

green build on track

1) Olympic Stadium
- Lightest Olympic Stadium to date – minimising use of steel and reducing carbon footprint
- Unwanted gas pipelines used for the roof truss
- Recycled granite from King Gorge V docks was used for the Stadium’s river banks
- High recycled content used for concrete foundations
- Bird and bat boxes built-in

2) Aquatics Centre
- High recycled content used for concrete foundations
- Water used to clean the swimming pool filters will be recycled for toilet flushing
- “Living wall” – biodiversity space for wildlife
- Sustainable timber used for cladding
- Bird and bat boxes built into Aquatics Centre bridge

3) Velodromo
- Light-weight venue design lowers carbon footprint
- Strategically placet roof lights will reduce the need artifical light
- Almost 100% naturally ventilated
- Designed to reduce water consumption by over 70%
- Rainwater harvesting for to flushing and landscape irrigation

4) Handball Arena
- 100% recycled aggregate for piling
- Rainwater harvesting to reduce potable water demani
- 88 light pipes in the ceiling to allow natural light into the venue
- working with the supplì chain to ensure that the copper used will be from a responsible source

5) Olympic Village
- Will achieve the Government’s new “Code for Sustainable Homes Level Four” which is a national environmental standard,
resulting in a 44% reduction in carbon emissione and 30% reduction in water use
- 40% of the roof space will be “green roofs”

6) IBC/MPC
- “Living roof” – biodiversity space for wildlife that will use materials reclaimed from site ie logs and seeds
- Bird and bat boxes
- Use of recycled water to flush the toilets and for other non-potable uses
- Off-site manufacture to minimise waste on site

7) Energy Centre
- Will provide efficient and low-carbon power to the Olympic Park
- Use new technology includine biomass boilers and a Combined Cooling Heat and Power (CCHP) plant which
captures the heat generated as a by-product of electricity production

8) Waterways
- Dredging has removed 30.000 tonnes of silt, gravel and rubale as well as tyres, shopping trolleys, timber and at least one car.
- Wetland bowls and rare wet woodlands already being formed in the north of the Park to create habitat and help mandage floodwater
- More than 4.000 properties will benefit from a significantly reduced risk of flooding

9) Rail
- Over 50% of materials by weight are delivered by train includine aggregate, kerbs and drainage units
- Waste removed from site via railways
- 500 tonnes of plasterboard and 100 pre-fabricated toilet pods have been delivered to the IBC/MPC site by rail
- 1.8 million tonnes of material delivered to the Olympic Park

10) Soil-washing
- One of the biggest clean-up operations of its kind
- Cleaning and reusing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of soil which would otherwise have to be transported off site
- A “soil hospital” produced material suitable for reuse within the construction works

11) Concrete batching plant
- Supplies low carbon concrete to all projects on the Park
- Helps reduce the embodied carbon of venues and infrastructure on the Park
- Raw materials are substituted with secondary or recycled materials such as by-products from coal power stations and steel manufacture

12) Parklands
- A new 100 hectare urban park that will provide a green space for people and wildlife
- More than 4.000 trees, 74.000 plants, 60.000 bulbs and 300.000 wetlands plants; one of the largest planting projects undertaken in the UK
- Also creating wildlife habitats includine reedbeds, grasslands, ponds, woodlands, 525 bird boxes, 150 bat boxes and artificial otter holts

London Olympic Stadium
Populous

The London Olympic Stadium is sited on a diamond-shaped island between two existing waterways, located within the southern section of the new Olympic Park. The design makes full use of the site’s island situation, providing a complete circuit of spectator podium concourse around the stadium, connected by bridges to the main park.
The key sustainability criteria of reduce, reuse and recycle were adopted to create a compact, flexible and lightweight design. The main Stadium structure is light and elegant, clearly expressed by the external diagonal articulation of the white tubular steel of the roof and the internal slender black steel supporting the temporary upper seating tier. Between these two frames lies the concourse façade, the full height ribbon sections of the fabric ‘wrap’. The black and white seats provide a neutral backdrop for the interior colour of the spectator facilities and pathways, and the animation that spectators will bring to the event.

London Aquatic Center
Zaha Hadid Architects

Design Concept
The architectural concept of the London Aquatic Centre is inspired by the fluid geometries of water in motion, creating spaces and a surrounding environment that reflect the riverside landscapes of the Olympic Park. An undulating roof sweeps up from the ground as a wave - enclosing the pools of the Centre with a unifying gesture of fluidity, while also describing the volume of the swimming and diving pools.
The Aquatics Centre is designed with an inherent flexibility to accommodate 17,500 spectators for the London 2012 Games in ‘Olympic’ mode while also providing the optimum spectator capacity of 2000 for use in ‘Legacy’ mode after the Games.

Site Context
The Aquatics Centre is within the Olympic Park Masterplan. Positioned on the south eastern edge of the Olympic Park with direct proximity to Stratford, a new pedestrian access to the Olympic Park via the east-west bridge (called the Stratford City Bridge) passes directly over the Centre as a primary gateway to the Park. Several smaller pedestrian bridges will also connect the site to the Olympic Park over the existing canal.
The Aquatic Centre addresses the main public spaces implicit within the Olympic Park and Stratford City planning strategies: the east-west connection of the Stratford City Bridge and the continuation of the Olympic Park along the canal.

Layout
The Aquatics Centre is planned on an orthogonal axis that is perpendicular to the Stratford City Bridge. All three pools are aligned on this axis. The training pool is located under the bridge with the competition and diving pools located within the large pool hall enclosed by the roof. The overall strategy is to frame the base of the pool hall as a podium connected to the Stratford City Bridge.
This podium element contains of a variety of differentiated and cellular programmes within a single architectural volume which is seen to be completely assimilated with the bridge. The podium emerges from the bridge to cascade around the pool hall to the lower level of the canal.
The pool hall is expressed above the podium by a large roof which arches along the same axis as the pools. Its form is generated by the sightlines of the 17,500 spectators in its Olympic mode. Double-curvature geometry has been used to generate a parabolic arch structure that creates the unique characteristics of the roof. The roof undulates to differentiate between the volumes of competition pool and the diving pool. Projecting beyond the pool hall envelope, the roof extends to the external areas and to the main entrance on the bridge that will be the primary access in Legacy mode. Structurally, the roof is grounded at 3 primary positions with the opening between the roof and podium used for the additional spectator seating in Olympic mode, then in-filled with a glass façade in Legacy mode.

 

London Velodrome
Hopkins Architects

The design strategy focused on minimizing demand for energy and water and integrating this into the fabric of the building to reduce reliance on systems and infrastructure.
The daylighting strategy applied to the main cycling arena exemplifies this approach. Rather than investing in PVs on the roof of the Velodrome or other ‘bolt-on’ technologies, designing for maximum daylight proved to be a much more economical solution which yielded far greater benefits in terms of reducing carbon emissions. A great deal of effort was put into developing and optimizing rooflights in the main arena to provide sufficient daylight for training purposes for most of the year. Special diffusing glass was used to prevent patches of sunlight appearing on the track and to give a high level of diffuse light inside the building. Energy efficient artificial lighting linked to an intelligent control system can be used to provide elevated lighting levels for major events. This achieves the best balance between energy savings due to daylight use without incurring excessive glazing areas, which would compromise the thermal strategy of the building. The main arena is highly insulated and fully naturally ventilated in mid-season and summer, significantly reducing energy demand. Rainwater is harvested from the Velodrome roof and stored in the undercroft at the west end of the building behind the berm. Recycled rainwater is used to supply the WC/Urinal flushing and any wash down points, along with irrigation of the Velopark when completed post–Games. Using the park-wide non-potable water only as top-up for the rainwater system in periods of low rainfall or high water demand and the use of water saving fittings throughout the building the Velodrome is predicted to achieve an annual reduction of 75% in potable water demand.
Due to their high sustainability aspirations the Olympic Delivery Authority has set a number of sustainability targets. Through carefully consideration and integration of the architecture, structure and building services the design has met or exceeded these requirements.

Central Park Bridge
Heneghan Peng Architects

In July 2007 the Olympic Delivery Authority launched an international Architectural Design Competition for the design of the Central Park Bridge (F06) in the Olympic park for the 2012 games in London.
The Bridge forms the centrepiece of the London 2012 Olympic Parklands, being located between the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre in the interface between North and South Park. Located within the site for the bridge is the historical Carpenters Lock with its beautiful and rare radial gates – a reminder of the site’s industrial past.
heneghan peng architects’ winning design for F06 achieves a symbiosis of both, Games and Legacy use, into one singular iconic structure. For the duration of the Games, the permanent main spans of the bridge with their slender diagonal gallery element that carries the visitors directly above the lock through the Legacy Park are joined by an immediate and colourful deck of ‘Olympic Confetti'. This temporary ‘infill’ element between the permanent spans captures the spirit of the festivities and accommodates the required visitor flow of the Games. In Legacy Mode, the 2 surfaces that form the ‘Olympic Confetti’, fold away to form a landscaped passage of two opposing amphitheatres - north and south-that lead you to the lower level. With the landscape folding away, Carpenters Lock is no longer hidden but framed by the two amphitheatres and the thin diagonal span overhead.