A year on from the excitement of London 2012, the Royal Artillery Barracks shooting venue is being reused across the country and is influencing venue design at home and abroad. sustain’ reports on an Olympic legacy in the making.
The torch is extinguished, the athletes are training for new medals and the television crews have moved on to other spectacles. With the Olympic and Paralympic Games behind us, the pressure is now on for the much-promised legacy to materialise.
The Olympic Park is undergoing an extensive makeover and its phased reopening began in June with a series of high-profile events – but London 2012 needs to have a legacy beyond the spotlight of the main park; each satellite venue must yield value for the future. One year on from the Games, the Olympic and Paralympic shooting venue is already setting a fine example.
During the Olympic Games the venue was located at the Royal Artillery Barracks on Woolwich Common. It featured three temporary shooting ranges with distinctive spotted white enclosures, and was conceived with a specific legacy vision in mind: productive reuse of the venue’s constituent parts, whether together or separately. This goal resulted in a highly transitory structure with no permanent elements, leaving Woolwich Common unscarred.
Rather than build something new from scratch and then sell it on, the design team took their reuse-based vision a step further by opting to incorporate, wherever possible, materials that had been used before. This meant that the shooting venue was in a sense a legacy project itself, with its own past life that the team calls the “pre-legacy”.
“We could have designed new, bespoke elements, but we liked the idea that something had been used previously, and that this was just another step in its journey,” says Mott MacDonald buildings and infrastructure director James Middling. Accordingly, the enclosures’ main steel structure was constructed from rented trusses of the type used for rock concerts and festivals. “We designed the structure so that it would come together for the Games and then go back into the rental market,” says Middling. “Many of the components had already been around the world and put up and taken down hundreds of times.”
Meanwhile, piled foundations were created from reclaimed oil pipelines previously used in Aberdeen. These were subsequently removed after the Games and sold back to the piling contractor Roger Bullivant for use on other projects.
This commitment to building with recovered materials wherever possible shrunk the carbon and water footprint of the venue, and motivated the team to minimise the materials needed in the first place. For example, timber baffles instead of a full roof above the shooting ranges were enough to satisfy safety requirements, and concrete was limited to the small amounts needed to create a stable slab from which competitors would shoot.
Other elements had to be bought new for this project, but are also being reused in legacy. For example, contractors have bought back fans, lighting and plywood from the venue, and the PVC manholes and soakaway crates used for the venue’s drainage were exhumed from the ground for use elsewhere.
The venue has not only being dismantled into a collection of individual parts – it is also moving on to new sporting purposes. The two smaller of the three enclosures – comprising fabric skins, tensioning rings and some steel elements such as spigots and clip pins – have been sold for reuse at a shooting club, youth football club and equestrian centre, all in south west England, while the sport elements of the ranges – comprising the range walls, astroturf, targets, baffles, lighting, microphones and other electronic systems – are planned to be reused at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. There is also the possibility that the finals range will be used for the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Brazil. Middling says this would be the first time that core components of a venue have moved directly from one major international Games to the next. “It shows that they are not just temporary venues – ‘demountable venues’ is a more correct description,” he says.
Beside its physical afterlife, the Royal Artillery Barracks also has an ideological legacy. For one thing, it has helped to foster positive perceptions of shooting. Spectators watched the events within a modern, colourful and fun-looking setting, in contrast to the conservative, conventional image often associated with the sport. “Good design can capture the imagination of the public,” says Middling.
But the biggest ideological impact of the project is within the field of venue design. This venue is an exemplar of the way in which London 2012 overturned preconceptions of temporary structures. Like the wider Games, the Royal Artillery Barracks showcased well designed structures that acted as transient overlays to existing environments, and showed off the city as a backdrop.
The shooting venue was a temporary structure designed to feel like a permanent one. Its striking architecture and substantial double-skinned construction made spectators feel that they were getting the full Olympic experience in a noteworthy venue, rather than watching a minor event in a makeshift tent. “Spectators for the shooting events were paying the same prices as for events staged in permanent venues on the main Olympic park. It was important that they felt there was equality of experience.” says Middling. “Many contractors say that temporary venues just can’t live up to permanent ones. I don’t think it’s true.”
Borrowing from its wealth of experience in designing permanent sport venues, Mott MacDonald applied a major project design approach and sophisticated BIM design, analysis and scheduling processes to this temporary venue. The results outstripped expectations, and it is hoped the underlying philosophy of transience and reuse combined with engineering and architectural excellence will influence the design of major international sporting events for years to come.
Mott MacDonald is already applying lessons learned from the Royal Artillery Barracks in its master planning role on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Rio de Janeiro has greater demand than London for permanent venues, so Middling predicts that the 2016 Olympics will not showcase temporary structures quite to the same extent. But he says the 2020 candidate cities – Istanbul in particular – are likely to take heavy cues from London’s temporary and overlay venues.
He emphasises that procurement is the key to creating a truly temporary venue that can be dispersed back into the rental market. Procuring appropriate materials is important – for example, the shooting venue’s fabric skins were made from phthalate-free PVC rather than ETFE, as the latter hardens in the sun and is therefore unsuitable for reuse – but getting contracts right is fundamental. Mott MacDonald ensured that many of the supply chain contracts contained buy-back clauses, leading to the swift sale and reuse of elements, and avoiding the costs of keeping items in storage while searching for a buyer.
The Royal Artillery Barracks was a central contributor to London 2012’s portfolio of bar-raising temporary venues. Last year’s Games proved that impermanent venues do not have to be artless or inefficient, and set a new sustainable template for future international competitions. “The Games opened people’s eyes to what you can do,” says Middling. “London changed the industry forever.”
(All photos courtesy Tom Page)
