After The Cheering Stops and The Crowds Go Home

http://www.blouinartinfo/news/story/1010649/sochis-pop-up-olympic-architecture-faces-an-uncertain-future

Iceberg Palace
Sochi, Russia
sportsillustrated.cnn.com

Hello Everyone:

The 2014 Winter Olympics are a happy distant memory.  Who didn't get a thrill over seeing your national team do well on the mountains, the sledding tracks, and on the ice.  No doubt, Summer or Winter Olympics are a very big deal for the host country.  An impending Olympics usually spurs a mad construction rush that can results in some very spectacular buildings like the Iceberg Palace in Sochi, Russia.  What happens after the entire world leaves and the host city is left with the empty buildings?  This the question that Anna Kats considers in her article "Sochi's Pop-Up Olympic Architecture Faces an Uncertain Future," for Blouin ArtInfo.  This question is not unique to Sochi but it is something that all Olympic host cities, from the beginning of the modern Olympiad in 1896 onward, have faced and will continue to face in the future.  For now, let's look at what the future could hold for the buildings of the Sochi Olympic Games.

Shayba Arena
sportsillustrated.cnn.com

With the Sochi Games over and done, the question remains, what will happen to the pop-up venues that miraculously sprang to life just in the nick of time as the world began arriving at the city's doorstep?  The answer to this question also has implications for other buildings featured in non-Olympic sports events, such as World Cup Soccer (football for the rest of the world).  Anna Kats reports that discussion over the fate of these structures are underway at a rapid pace, given that the cost to put on the Games totaled $51 billion, the most expensive event in Olympic history. Large chunks of money was spent to construct an Olympic Park with a massive stadium and smaller arenas, and satellite ski resorts villages and athletic track known as Mountain Cluster, all tasked with accommodating athletes and tourists.  The hundreds of millions spent on the sites highlighted the potential failure of Russian involvement in Olympic architecture. Nearly two months removed from the games, the resort city of Sochi will have find a why to reconcile the architectural footprint left by the games with the local cultural and economic realities.

Bolshoi Ice Dome, interior
olympic.ca

Not long after the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing closed, Kriston Capps wrote in the Guardian, "World record-setting projects in architecture and urban design rarely pay off for host nations....Lack of use, expensive upkeep and bewildering construction costs have plagued cities that have undertaken similarly grand missions for the Olympics."  To make his point, Mr. Capps cited the 2004 Athens Games in which the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee spent $13 billion to renovated existing stadiums and commissioned Santiago Calatrava to build a complex roof structure.  Once the cheering stopped and everyone went home, the Greeks found themselves considering demolishing the unused post-Olympic structures.

Fisht Stadium
Populous
planetminecraft.com

In Sochi, officials did not even wait until the games began to considered dismantling some of the Olympic Park stadiums.  Whereas previous Winter Olympic host cities had to construct new buildings around existing athletic venues, Sochi has no winter sports infrastructure (it's on the Black Sea coast) when construction began in 2008. Fascinating.  This begs the question, if construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi began in 2008, why were the venues not fully operational until literally days before the games opened?  Nearly all the arenas, resorts, and residences completed in the nick of time are completely new developments.  For example, Mountain Cluster, sixty miles from downtown Sochi, is a pastische of European styles.  Similarly, marshland twenty miles outside of the city was paved over with concrete to accommodate Olympic Park planned by sports architect Populous.  The actual events took place near Sochi, in a swamp and a forest.  The arena that held these events were not designed to be site specific-thus products of quick design and construction that could outlive the game thanks to generic look which renders them multi-use.

Mountain Cluster
teamusa.org

Architectural theorist and historian Grigory Revzin opined, "If the idea for the Sochi Olympics was to create something aesthetically interesting...then the project has failed."  Well yes, you didn't need a doctorate in architecture to figure that out.  Mr. Revzin, the author of "Russian Architecture at the Turn of the 21st Century" and an architecture critic for the Moscow-based Kommersant newspaper, believes that aesthetic merit was not a priority for authorities in Sochi.  Again, not hard to see that. Instead, Mr. Revzin argues that the officials sought to construct spaces that were generic enough so that they could be relocated elsewhere.  That would explain the cardboard bathroom doors, right Johnny Quinn?  "The idea at the Olympic Park was to create the semblance of a global place," said Mr. Revzin before citing examples of international venues that were replicated at Sochi.  The Bolshoi Ice Stadium, designed by  Omsk, Russia-based firm Mostovik, is a copy of the Beijing Opera House designed by Paul Andreu in 2007.

Bolshoi Ice Stadium
en.olympic.cn

Beijing National Grand Opera House
Paul Andreu
fluxbuilt.com

Mr. Revzin snarked that Fisht Stadium, with all the electrical wires sticking out of the walls and unfinished interior details resembled an "...a ruin than a new stadium, like it has been heavily used for the past 20 years." Ouch.

The Olympic Park buildings' uniform deployment of ubiquitous curvilinear forms clad in the equally common Modernist-inflected glass and steel is a nod to the international standard for contemporary corporate  architecture.  The prevailing use of architectural tropes was intended to suggest that the venues at Sochi were just like any other Olympic venue outside of Russia.  Grigory Revzin suggests that the buildings were meant to be international in style, but not world-class architecture.  Mr. Revzin references Herzog and de Meuron's Bird's Nest Stadium which drew international accolades during the Beijing Games.  "Since the Olympics are meant to attract international attention, one would expect some kind of exceptional architecture for the event.  We don't have of the sort among the Sochi stadiums." declared Mr. Revzin.






Fisht Stadium is slated to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, in the meantime, some of the smaller venues within Olympic Park are awaiting permanent relocation to winter sports destinations in Russia.  Rob Hornstra, a founder of the website The Sochi Project (http://www.thesochiproject.org) said, "I've heard that Adler Speedskating Stadium will be deconstruction and built up somewhere else in Russia.  Mr. Hornstra is also the author of An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus and has spent the years working as a photojournalist in Sochi.  The Kommersant reported in 2008, when construction began , Russian officials already planned to disassemble and relocate some of the smaller Olympic Park venues. Shayba Arena, built by the Ural Mini and Metallurgical Company, was intended to serve as a temporary structure, taken apart after the games, shipped and reassembled in Stavropol to function as the city's hockey and skating arena.  Similarly, the Ice Cube Curling arena will be disassembled, shipped off elsewhere, and rebuilt into a mall.  Naturally.  Eventually, Sochi's subtropical climate and its identity as a former Soviet Union summer resort town will render the winter sports arenas completely moot.  Perhaps they are better off in places around Russia that are more conducive to winter sports.

The Mountain Cluster buildings may not share such the same fate as the Olympic Park buildings.  "There has never been a high-quality ski resort in Russia, it simply didn't exist, and now, even though it's not fully ready, the infrastructure for it is there," declared Grigory Revzin.  Mr. Revzin dismissed the Rosa Khutor ski resort owned by businessman Vladimir Potamin as a "trivial" exercise in historical pastische and the nearby Mountain Village resort is "actually quite interesting."  In both cases, Mr. Revzin believes that they will be popular with Muscovites, who are only a few hours away from the slopes rather than six hours and one visa application away from the Swiss Alps.  Eventually the ski resorts will have to serve a post-Olympic clientele, which Mr. Revzin hopes will encourage local tourism.  If Russia successfully moves the buildings, Sochi could be the first host city to find a solution to the vexing problem of what to with the venue buildings once the cheering stops.  Which arena will be moved is undetermined, since authorities haven't drawn up in final plans.  It could happen but then again, you never know in Russia.

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