Populous Leads Olympic Design Team

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympics Games (LOCOG) has appointed Populous (the former HOK Sport Architecture) as its Official Architectural and Overlay Design Services Provider, becoming a 'tier three' commercial provider in the process.

Populous is leading the team comprising Allies & Morrison and Lifshutz Davidson Sandilands to deliver the architectural and overlay design. The consortium will work with LOCOG's Venue and Infrastructure team, which is responsible for installing overlay to existing and newly built venues to ensure that they are fit for purpose for the Olympic Games and Paralympics Games. The consortium will provide design and drawing production services to support the development of these overlay designs for London 2012 venues.

The scope of this work includes 36 competition venues located both inside and outside the Olympic Park as well as a large number of non-competition venues including the Olympic Village, and the International Broadcast Centre/Main Press Centre (IBC/MPC).

Commenting on Populous' provider status, London 2012 Chairman Sebastian Coe stated "ensuring venues are ship-shape for Games-time use is a logistical challenge.

"Both new and existing venues will require additional work to ensure that they are operational and meet the unique criteria of the Games.

"We welcome Populous to the team â and look forward to working closely with them to bring the Games venues to life for 2012."

Populous has played an instrumental role within the Olympic masterplanning team for the 2012 summer games, working for two years prior to the award of The Games to London on the integration of sports operational planning and preliminary venue design for the Olympic, Paralympic and Legacy Park masterplans.

The same successful masterplanning consortium have been commissioned to see the project through to on site delivery alongside CLM to ensure Olympic operational compliance.

Populous is also designing the main Stadium for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as part of Team Stadium (which includes the construction company, Sir Robert McAlpine, and engineers Buro Happold).

Their innovative solution for the 80,000-seat stadium is a design which will reduce down to 25,000 seats after the 2012 Games.

The Stadium represents a new era of Olympic design demonstrating how a successful event can be blended with the long term needs of a community. The Populous design explores materials, structure and operational systems of the stadium in a completely different way, a sustainable approach which uses only what is needed for the event and then transforms to its long term future, the whole process using a minimum of materials and services.

As it heads towards its £2 billion budget for staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games, LOCOG now has seven domestic Tier One Partners - adidas, BP, British Airways, BT, EDF Energy, Lloyds TSB and Nortel. There are three domestic Tier Two Supporters - Adecco, Cadbury and Deloitte. There are seven domestic Tier Three Suppliers and Providers - Airwave, Atkins, Boston Consulting Group, Crystal CG, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, Populous and Trident.

The Worldwide Olympic Partners signed up for 2012 are Coca-Cola, Acer, Atos Origin, GE, McDonaldâs, Omega, Panasonic, Samsung and Visa.

Populous featured in the March/April 2009 issue of Australasian Leisure Management. 

2nd April 2009 - POPULOUS - DRAWING PEOPLE TOGETHER