London’s proposal for the 2012 Olympics was to design a sustainable Park for the future, the ‘legacy’, at the same time as deliver the temporary Park needed for the few weeks of the Games. In early 2012 I was assisting the landscape architects with images for the Making of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park book and began photographing these views as the staging began to set.
Temporary architecture like the Wilkinson Eyre Basketball Arena and structures to support additional seating, pedestrian routes and concourses were removed soon after the Games along with the striking pop-art Heneghan Peng 'confetti' rings on the Central Park bridge, decorative wraps and all the Games sponsored branding.
These images are of architectural interventions where temporality trumps the usual spatial and material features of architecture. The project also serves as a memory of a meticulously staged and carefully manicured landscape in the months leading up to those first spectator crowds.
