The story of an Olympic athlete tends to follow a particular arc: A gritty competitor fights long and hard, with little monetary compensation, for a remote shot at international sporting glory. Granted, a few do make it to the Wheaties box and post-Olympic fame, but for every Oksana Baiul (who can forget her deft defeat of Nancy Kerrigan?) there’s a raft of also-rans who are lucky to spend the rest of their careers with Disney on Ice.
The built Olympics—the stadiums, public greens, infrastructure, and architectural legacy—follow much the same course: Some succeed in energizing and invigorating their host cities, while others come to function as multimillion-dollar ghost towns. Dennis Pieprz, a principal at Sasaki Associates Inc. in Boston—winner of the international competition to design the urban plan for the 2008 Beijing games—knows this all too well. His firm’s unifying vision for Beijing (others will carry it out) aims toward fertile new development with a clear future instead of a grand, momentary feat that promptly devolves into underused urban space.
“The most important aspect of the urban planning of the Olympics is the legacy and what you have left over given the huge investment,” says Pieprz. “The post-Olympic part of the project was of great interest and significance for us in Beijing. Some Olympics have been very successful at this, and others have raised issues that really need to be thought about.”
Beyond introducing extensive new green space at the northern end of the city—Forest Park, a centerpiece of the design that promises to benefit the city for years, will offer nearly 1,700 acres of woods and wetlands—Pieprz and his colleagues at Sasaki have a novel plan for integrating the new Olympic Green into Beijing. And it relies on a remarkably free-market strategy, yet another indication that the communist behemoth isn’t at all averse to the occasional capitalist venture.
“One big thing you have with the Olympics is international-level stadiums and facilities that may not be used much after the event,” he explains. “That’s what happened in Sydney. The stadium that was built there is lovely, but it’s used maybe 30 times a year.” The operation and management of these sports complexes threaten to become a burden on Beijing once the games are over, so Sasaki developed a unique strategy to shift the load onto those willing to take it. “We added facilities and parcels of land adjacent to the Olympic facilities for private development companies to purchase and use once the games are done,” says Pieprz, who sees hotels, spas, office space, or even more densely built sports facilities filling in the grounds. These companies will “use the Olympic facilities as part of a later, integrated project that will be more than just a series of sports stadiums,” he adds.
For Pieprz, this post-Olympic plan is all part of the push toward sustainability, one that the “Green Olympics,” as the International Olympic Committee is billing the Beijing games, is desperate to achieve. Though certain new buildings are being constructed with green design in mind—the National Aquatics Center, a glowing, bubble-inspired creation from the Australian firm PTW Architects, will heat the pools and interior with solar power and filter and recycle the water collected on the roof—the Sasaki team sees sustainability as more than slapping solar panels on the velodrome. Integrating the Olympic Green into the surrounding neighborhoods, providing transportation access to all parts of the city, and envisioning attractive civic spaces for the post-Olympic era are paramount in Sasaki’s plan. “Green isn’t really only about ecological matters, or things related to clean air or water,” Pieprz notes. “Green is about the social sustainability of urban design, and discovering leftover or brown fill sites that can be regenerated to become part of a living, vital urban environment.”
Part of the motivation for the Beijing plan came not from an Olympic plan that worked, but one that didn’t. Concurrently with its work for the 2008 games, Sasaki is working with three Australian firms to envision the next 20 years for the decidedly underused site of the 2000 Sydney games. Built outside the city center, the Sydney site proves to be a cautionary tale: “The Sydney games were considered one of the most successful Olympiads,” Pieprz says. “Great facilities and setting, well managed. They even had a substantial environmental strategy and created new parks that are still thriving ecological zones today. But the core of the Olympic site consists of sports buildings, set widely apart to accommodate crowds, sitting in an underused civic landscape that took huge investment to create.” Current plans for the Sydney revitalization call for additional housing, live/work space, and entertainment and educational facilities to attract both developers and day-trippers.
Sydney may suggest what not to do, but for further inspiration Sasaki looked back to what is, from the urban planning perspective, a clear gold medalist: Barcelona in 1992. “Barcelona is always held up as a huge success because the strategy there was to use the investment and the event to trigger a regeneration of the whole city,” Pieprz says. “It set Barcelona on a great path of growth and evolution in the ’90s and into the 21st century.”
Certain buildings for the Beijing Olympics clearly stand out, such as the National Aquatics Center and the Olympiad’s tour de force: Herzog + de Meuron’s 80,000-seat National Stadium, a glistening, steel bird’s nest that serves as the literal and figurative heart of the games. But Pieprz’s vision for the Olympic Green extends beyond the needs of world-class athletes to those of a more humble quality: the citizens of the Chinese capital.
“In China you get huge crowds of people doing exercises to music in massive parks,” he says. “You don’t really see that in the States, except maybe for joggers. But in China exercise is a very public thing.” Thus a commitment to accessible public spaces, integrated into not just the built environment but into the social and cultural fabric of the city, guides Sasaki’s plans for the future of Beijing—and Sydney, too. “In our plan, we were very attentive to the whole city, its historic structure, and what significant addition to the urban form we can make. We began to think, wouldn’t it be interesting for visitors and residents if this were more than simply a sports district? What if you could gain access to all of Chinese culture and history?”
