The World of Design – Olympic Architecture; the good, the bad, and the promising.

This is a new blog where we dive into interesting topics and styles of architecture and how they affect society and the world of design that we live in. Each blog will look at the good, the bad, and the promising.

The Olympics, a time to celebrate culture, country, and sport.

While the sporting events being held are on center stage during this international competition, the venues in which these events take place seem to always take centerstage both before, and especially after the competition. Whether it is hoping that Rio de Janeiro’s many stadia and venues would be fit for competition in the weeks before the game or the problems that the city of Sochi now face in wake of hosting their 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

The Bad

These host cities spend tons of money erecting these magnificent pieces of art and architecture but at what cost? Most of these stadia are used for short durations, (some for only a couple of days) during the 2 to 3 weeks of the total event and then are left in ruin just a few weeks after. A quick search on the web reveals what kind of legacy these venues leave behind, and it is quite sad to see some of the best designers in a country spend the time and the energy designing and constructing these beautiful venues just to see their shelf life last no more than 2-3 months.

These failures have been coined as white elephants, a term all too familiar in the world of architecture. The white elephant is a sad tale about a building so highly touted, so life altering, that when it became part of the physical world it didn’t live up to the expectation and/or could not fit In to the surrounding situation. The Rio Olympic Games were a good example of the white elephant and how it has affected the cities and countries in a less than positive way outside of the event. Venues like the controversial golf course and the famed Maracanã Stadium fell into disrepair less than 6 months after the games had ended.

Another way to counter the white elephant problem would be to find a permanent home for the games, one city that could hold the quadrennial games. There could even be the development of two homes, one for the summer and another for the winter.