Real Time
Society of the spectacle

Anyone wondering what ‘real’ architecture looks like these days should spend 5 minutes on the Olympic Delivery Authority website to view their thrilling video of a little boy and Seb Coe’s dreams come true. Lord Coe gets paid £0.5m a year, to smarm himself all over the airwaves and disguise the true cost, which is forever more than is published. It’s no wonder there’s a smirk on his face, but the little boy probably got paid nothing for laying his shoes on the hallowed turf of the ‘legacy’ stadium. I don’t suppose it is known what Peter Cook got paid for dreaming up the multi-coloured pods that spin Dan Dare-like though space to accompany the boring old mothership on its journey from the London Eye to a previously occupied industrial estate on an artificial hillock by the River Lea, but I’d expect he wasn’t far behind Lord Coe in the dash for cash.

Quite why spending half a billion pounds to end up with a second-rate athletics stadium marooned in yuppy housing developments in the Lower Lea Valley is something to get excited about is perhaps best left to Tessa Jowell, the clueless minister in charge, to explain. It’s particularly strange considering that the same architects and contractors designed and built Arsenal’s new £300m, 60,000 stadium that very few afficionados of new colossea find wanting.

Maybe it was the added enthusiasm for tacky temporality brought to the project by Cook, that cooked up (cocked-up?) the design and disguised its banality with a ‘process’ illustrated by walking city trusses that conspire to erect a tribute to his and HOK’s and Jowell’s and Coe et al’s lack of imagination in the appallingly slick and cheesy video.

Watch it at your peril, it may turn you on… I guess that the RIBA board would have judged it as sufficiently programmatic and rigorous to scale the barriers they call RIBA 1 and RIBA 2, and the more socially conscious units in ASD might admire its lack of serious pretension.

My project is to tap into the 3.0m diameter Bazalgette main sewers as they span the river on the opening night and surround the stadium in a moat of shit. I wonder if Cedric Price would have approved?

Gordon MacLaren