The year of iconus horribilis

摘要

The money has run out and so, you might think, given this year's bumper crop - two Zahas, two Chipperfields, and a couple each from Rem and Rogers - have the buildings. Will 2011 be remembered as the end of a golden era? As our building studies attest, we think the architecture of the London 2012 Olympic Park is actually rather good. There's an (expensive) echo of Archigram at Stratford, of plug-in elements (the seating wings on Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre) and demountable structures, best expressed in Heneghan Peng's remarkable bridge, designed with akt ii, which has two quite different forms for games and legacy use, and which we'll study next year.