“Some sort of sea life creature” is how architect Zaha Hadid describes the 269 million pound ($439 million) Aquatics Centre she just completed for the London 2012 Olympic Games. This weekend, ARTKABINETT collectors continue previewing some of the wonderful structures we will see for next summer's Olympiad. Yesterday, we were treated to an unveiling of a monumental sculpture by Ansoh Kapoor. Seems like prominent Iraqi-born artists are going to have marvelous impact on these events. Hadid's pool complex has an undulating roof that looks like a big skate fish. Temporarily tucked under its wings are chunky legs to fit the extra 15,000 seats needed for the Games; the legs will come off later to restore the original contours. The concrete sections on either side, with 15,000 extra seats, will be removed at the end of the Games. The Aquatics Centre is the first London landmark by Hadid, who has long been an unsung heroine in the U.K. -- despite living here for the past four decades, and becoming the first woman, in 2004, to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it's like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it's very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama. The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete. Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It's something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The grays of the structure are offset by strong primary colors: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions. The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics' most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012's most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant. The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome's roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre's – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue. Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid's design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn't exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.
