Advanced Design Studio, Fior / Clarke

All Best Laid Plans - Legacy and Risk

London declared that the 2012 Olympic site will be a legacy for East London: the legacy is to emerge from the remains of the games as a new piece of city with neighbourhoods and infrastructure. This legacy is in the main to be delivered by developers and private investment as a low risk strategy. For political reasons, risk avoidance has been an important theme for these Olympics.

The elimination of risk demanded the re-use of a tried and tested model. But there is no pre-existing model, because the situation, the site, the real place of the Lower Lea Valley where the Olympics is sited is specific only to itself. Only by holding everything that is known about the site at arm's length can the fantasy of the elimination of risk be entertained.

The paradox of the arm's length approach is that it actually precludes any accuracy: to test the relevance of the emerging design in relation to a place requires an interrogation, a testing of both the place against the design and vice versa. Detail informs the strategic moves.

These interesting times mean that certainties have crumbled, but the legacy has been promised and therefore must be delivered, albeit more slowly, and in order for the double blight of fallow sites to be avoided, temporary site uses must be found. 'Temporary' in this context can mean 30 years.

Students are asked to contribute to creating an alternative Olympic legacy. Each student will produce a proposal for an alternative temporary use for a portion of the wider Olympic site. The students will work between proposal and critique, detail and strategy, and the tactical and the material. The student will draw on the example of New Haven to exploit the coincidence of the Yale bowl and park which are the same footprint of the Olympic site alongside the effect of stalled developments as a means to explore both scale and the methodology of moving between acquired and received knowledge, and between the arm's-length and the up close and personal.

Travel Week

Travel week will be based in London. The week will have a dense itinerary of site investigation alongside a series of presentations and seminars from the interested parties (very broadly defined) involved in the Olympic site, including the Mayor's Office, the Olympic Development Authority (ODA), critics of the project including those using art practice, and the original master planners. The week will begin with a review of the work the students undertake in New Haven and end with a review of each student's first take on their particular portion of the site.