In the swim: Hadid’s Aquatics Centre opens

This week’s opening of the London 2012 Aquatics Centre spells the end of a tense time for the ODA, especially as the National Audit Office had expressed concern last February that its completion date was going to run into June from April. Jan-Carlos Kucharek was there. As it was, the date slipped even further, to the 27th July- fortuitously to the ‘One Year to go to the Olympics’ deadline. It proved a good day to bury what some at the ODA might have considered ‘bad news’.

You could tell it was a big day for the client as Zaha turned up uncharacteristically promptly to answers questions on a design that has been swimming around in our collective consciousness since 2004, when its bold vision helped sell the seriousness of London’s Olympic bid.

So what’s it like? The story is that the internal space below that huge oversailing 3000 tonne steel roof is pretty much textbook Zaha, and all the more impressive for it. White fairface concrete abounds, walls and openings in them lean like they are urging you somewhere, and high above the Olympic pool level Hadid’s distended sinusoidal timber roof soffit stretches 190m from end to end.

All well and good; of course the problem, as everyone guessed, was the relationship of this flowing elegance to the temporary seating areas that will be housing 14,500 of the 17,500 spectators of the pool events. Propped up on apologetically painted white steel stilts they sit appended to the Hadid’s main structure and covered in PVC fabric like two disorientated marquees. The sight lines might just about work internally, but there’s no doubting the unsightliness of them from the outside.

It’s no surprise then that Jim Heverin, ZHA project director spent more time talking about the building in ‘Legacy mode’, when huge glass walls will replace the openings left by the removed seats.  It’s like everyone is waiting for this huge white winged moth to go against nature, for its oversized wings to shrink away again, and for it to revert to its gorgeous, smooth and crystalline cocoon. That is the concept we bought.