After the 2012 Olympics, the housing in the Olympic village, currently used for all of the Athletes attending the event, will be refurbished & altered, to convert it into private housing. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, architect Niall McLaughlin has decided to clad some of these building in panels that replicate the Parthenon Marbles, cast out of concrete. Tom Flynn has already written about it on his blog here.

From:
Notes From The Underground

East is East : The Athletes Village and the Elgin Marbles

Once the dust from the Olympics and Paralympics has settled, the Athletes Village will be transformed into East Village. Hosting over17,000 athletes and team officials during the Olympic Games, the Village will be converted into 2,818 residential units including 1,379 affordable homes. The athletes currently sleep in the homes of future owners, fulfilling the site’s own mantra of ‘Beds for athletes, homes for Londoners’. And what homes they are, with beautifully differentiated envelopes and the Lea Valley Park on their doorstep. Meanwhile, with athletes from all 205 competing countries in the village, a worldwide community is sure to identify these individual blocks as home for the next month.

One piece of this differentiation caught my eye in particular. Down at the Building Centre on Store Street, there was a slick exhibition of what the Village will be like after the games. New London Architecture, in association with Delancey, put on the exhibition ‘East Village – a lasting legacy for London’ from the 13th to the 31st March to showcase the architectural and design excellence of the village set within the broader context of the transformation of East London (1). Here models of the entire proposal sat alongside descriptions of the area, drawings from the architects and materials for the buildings themselves. Right in the middle of them all was this:
Read the rest of this entry »

The London Olympics in 2012 represent a unique opportunity for Britain & Greece to reach an agreement on the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. Professor Mika Kajava from the University of Helsinki elaborated on this at a lecture given recently.

From:
University of Helsinki

Return of the Marbles?
12th May 2009

“London now has a unique possibility to live up to modern thinking and international agreement by declaring to bring the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens”

– London is hosting the Olympics in the year 2012. London now has a unique possibility to live up to modern thinking and international agreement by declaring to bring the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens, says Professor Mika Kajava from the University of Helsinki and Vice President of the Finnish Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Sculptures.
Read the rest of this entry »