Design for London’s Olympic Stadium unveiled

Britain’s Olympic Delivery Authority today unveiled the design for the London 2012 Olympic Stadium which will be the centre piece of the Olympic park that is being built over the next five years at Stratford in East London.

Its going to be an 80,000 seater although once the games have finished 55,000 will be removed and the stadium will retain only 25,000 seats as an athletics venue and possibly one for a rugby club or lower league football club, Leyton Orient being the obvious choice.

The stadium is design by architects HOK Sport whose previous projects include Wembley Stadium, Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and the O2 Arena in London as well as stadiums all around the world such as baseball’s Jacobs Field in Cleveland, Busch Stadium in St Louis and the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.

I can’t say that the initial artist impressions blow me away, but maybe that’s a good thing and they’ve gone for a functional stadium that will do the job for three weeks and not go vastly over budget like some architectural concept masterpiece might, although the cost they gave today for the completed build was £496million, up from the £280million when London won the Olympic bid in 2005. Work on the Olympic Stadium is expected to start in April 2008.