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
Olympic City
Madrid is changing in pursuit of the 2016 Olympics. The new Centre de Tennis Olimpique by Dominique Perrault provides an example.
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- 03 July 2009
- Madrid