Remembrance and future in the Olympic Park

I went to an event on Saturday that was both enjoyable and sad. It was the celebration of the life of John Hopkins, the landscape client of the Olympic Park who had much of the responsibility for making it so wonderful. He died suddenly earlier this year, aged only 59.
The event was held at the Olympic Park, on the north lawn, part of the northern part of the park that will re-open in July. it is still a busy construction site, and access was very limited (we had to be bussed in), but even the small part we could see looked splendid. Nicholas Serota, one of the stellar cast of speakers at the event, quoted Christopher Wren's memorial plaque in St Paul Cathedral 'If you want to see his monument, look around you.'
Visitors when the park re-opens will be able to walk on the Hopkins Meadow, which will include an American oak planted in his memory.

Could we enjoy the Olympic Park in September?

It is ironic that, as Building Design reports, Rogers Stirk Harbour is having to abandon plans to exhibit a prefabricated house during September's London Design Festival because of the knock-on impact of the Olympics and Paralympics. “We identified two or three sites but we ran out of time finding the right site,” a spokeswoman said. “A lot have been taken up with Olympics things such as sites to store crowd barriers.”
The irony is that it would be easy to name some empty sites - those 'meanwhile uses' such as the Pleasure Gardens that have shut down because of lack of visitors. Their business plans have failed and everybody is very upset. Making them temporary venues for the LDF and putting the prefab house on one sounds superficially attractive - but in fact nobody will want to go to east London in September. The Olympic site will not only be shut, but will be crawling with contractors, involved in demolition.
Unless ... wouldn't it be great to keep it open in September, allow people who didn't get tickets to gawp at the venues and enjoy the planting, and put in some temporary uses for the LDF? Of course it would cost money, but without the international athletes, dignitaries and world press, a much lighter hand would be needed for security. What an end to a fabulous summer that would be.

The campaign against Olympic gagging

I can't stop smiling at the photograph of Hattie Hartman, sustainability editor of The Architects' Journal, sporting the Olympic protest dress.

The absurdity of the ban on designers promoting the work they have done on the project becomes more obvious by the day. I was with the several members of the landscape team on the Olympic Park yesterday. Visitors to the site have been stunned by just how gorgeous the landscape is, and it will be an indisputable treasure of the legacy - in an area starved of outdoor space it will be a tremendous asset, and it is also a pathfinder for sustainable design. Yet they, like the architects and engineers, have been subjected to these ridiculous gagging orders. Only now are some of them starting to relax their constraints a little.
Let us hope that by the time we get to the Paralympics we can celebrate everybody - athletes and also the design teams without whom none of it could have happened.

London's East End and Middle East

Yesterday's Observer Review section had a special focus on the East End of London, as a slightly quirky preview of the Olympics. It covered everything from the best clubs to an interview with artist Rachel Whiteread who not only lives in the area but whose latest installation will be on the front of the Whitechapel Gallery. At its heart though was a piece by Rowan Moore, who is not only the paper's architecture critic but also a long-term resident of the East End ( I suspect he spends his weekends in the country).
Moore discusses the perennial problem of gentrification, that the undoubted changes for the better in the physical environment and in facilities bring with them rising housing prices and a danger of not catering to long-term residents. This contrast is accentuated by the presence of Canary Wharf, the new financial district which houses some of the country's richest (and most reviled) bankers. Moore talks about a 'lumpy' social fabric that echoes the lumpy physical fabric.
He doesn't have many kind things to say about the Olympics either, arguing that it does not work as a coherent whole. Elsewhere in the paper there is a long article about the growing influence and ambitions of Qatar, which has bought the Olympic Park, and is of course a major investor in the Shard which had a fancy completion celebration last week. It certainly was Qatar's week - there was also a large conference in London called Qatar Infrastructure Projects 2012 looking not at how the Qataris could further invest here, but at how the British could win work over there. It is a reminder of how truly international property and construction are. But there is still a slight uneasiness about the level of Qatari investment in London's property scene. This is not I think any particular dislike of the Qataris but just because it is a blatant reminder that so much of our infrastructure is seen as an investment opportunity rather than a way of improving the well-being of residents - whichever country they come from.