The London Aquatics Centre, in the United Kingdom, is a work by Zaha Hadid Architects and it was reopened to the public on March the 1st after replacing all the temporary stands used during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Now the centre provides the public with swimming and diving lessons to all ages and abilities, as well as a variety of fitness and family sessions, water polo, synchronised swimming, diving, triathlon, sub aqua, gym and dry diving facilities. Featuring 2,500 seats for spectators the infrastructure will also continue with its purpose of hosting national and international competitions scheduled for the upcoming years. Located at the south eastern edge of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on the New Stratfford City Bridge, in east London, the Aquatic Centre reveals a design concept inspired by the fluid geometry of water in motion. New spaces and surrounding environment were created in order to establish a complementary harmony with the river landscape. The expressive roof emerges like a big wave and giving to the whole monumental steel structure a sense of lightness. The roof has “about 3,200 tonnes of structural steel, of which 2,000 tonnes are fabricated plate girders with the structural connections totalling around 600 tonnes”. The building is planned on an orthogonal axis perpendicular to the Stratford City Bridge. There are three pools: the training one is located under the bridge whilst the competition and diving are both within a large volumetric pool hall. The purpose was to frame the base of the pool hall as a podium by surrounding it and connecting it into the bridge. The describing text of the project says that “this podium element allows for the containment of a variety of differentiated and cellular programmatic elements into a single architectural volume which is seen to be completely assimilated with the bridge and the landscape”. We see the podium emerging from the bridge and then cascading around the pool hall to the lower level of the canal. “The pool hall is expressed above the podium level by a large roof which arches along the same axis as the pools. Its form is generated by the sightlines for the spectators during the Olympic mode. Double-curvature geometry has been used to create a structure of parabolic arches that define its form.
The roof undulates to differentiate the volumes of the competition and diving pools, and extends beyond the pool hall envelope to cover the external areas of the podium and entrance on the bridge. The roof structure is grounded at three points of the centre (two points at the northwest end on the bridge; and one single point to the south east end). This structural arrangement ensured 7,500 temporary spectator seats could be installed along either side of the pools in Olympic mode (total 15,000 temporary seats) with no structural obstructions. After the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, this temporary seating has been removed and replaced with glazing panels, leaving a capacity of 2,500 seats for community use and future national/international events, with a significantly reduced pool hall volume”. www.zaha-hadid.com
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