When Madrid lost its bid for the 2012 Olympics to London it immediately began preparations to re-enter the ring for the 2016 Games, competing with Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Proposing to make the city an Olympic Village in its own right, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, Mayor since 2003, offers one of the most compact Olympic designs ever, with 96 per cent of the venues within 10 kilometres of the city centre. Regardless of the economic crunch hitting city development elsewhere, big plans here for urban renewal continue apace. While construction of the Campus of Justice to the north (15 court buildings by Foster, Rogers, Hadid and others) may have slowed, the recent municipal works subsidy of over 8 billion euros announced by President Zapatero gives the capital city staying power, despite rumours that the council is heavily in debt.
The “Magic Box” was designed by Dominique Perrault and billed as the “best new sporting venue in the northern hemisphere”. Inaugurated in May, it sits on a flat peripheral 17-hectare site, which was formerly slum housing and is connected to the Parque del Manzanares (by Ricardo Bofill, 2003) in the south of the city. Three stadiums for 12,500, 3,500 and 2,500 spectators respectively and huge refreshment areas, enveloped by walls of hung metal mesh, have an austere, airy industrial vastness that is also well suited for music events. Each stadium has a retractable slab roof whose hydraulic jack enables air and light to enter and tennis matches to continue even in bad weather. Perrault shoots a new street through the site linking the park and an artificial lake. Players rallying on the four outdoor competition courts and nine training courts must feel like they have their own piece of city. Most of the Games facilities are planned for the core zone, “the heart”, in the east of the city. Cruz y Ortiz are remodelling their 1994 La Peineta Stadium, tripling its seating capacity. Nearby in the Olympic Park is the four-pool Aquatics Centre, designed by Juan José Medina, and the Telefónica Arena Madrid. At the top of the Paseo de la Castellana axis, Mansilla & Tuñón are building a new International Convention Center with three auditoriums seating 8,000 people to boost business tourism. They would like to see their icon of future Madrid – like a rose window between the belfries of a cathedral – host the opening ceremony of the Games. Located in a new northern financial district, it will sit in front of the new Cuatro Torres Business Area (CTBA), an impressive cluster of towers (Caja Madrid being the tallest at 250 metres) transforming the skyline that was completed last year by Foster, Pelli, Rubio & Alvarez-Sala and I.M. Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners.
As in London, Madrid’s Olympic bid has a legacy plan. The first part of the River Zone (“The Lungs”, turning the Manzanares River to the southwest of the city centre into an ecological boulevard) will be completed this year. Madrid Calle 30, won by West 8 and Garrido, converts the M30, the first ring road, into a tunnel, leaving the riverbanks with more than 820 hectares of new public spaces including a “beach” and 9 new walkways to link some of Madrid’s poorest neighbourhoods. This promises to be quite something, but while Madrid has also set great store by its exemplary public housing procured by EMVS, most recently working with local and international architects at Carabanchel, its rapidly growing suburbs show an alarmingly dull, homogenous character. Ecosistema Urbano Arquitectos’s Eco Boulevard at Vallecas in the southeast introduced green technology and community facilities as a necessary corrective to monocultural development. Now that living in the centre of Madrid is so much more expensive, developments outside the compact urban model competing for the glittering prize of the 2016 Olympics are still part of the city’s body and also deserve attention.
Lucy Bullivant