Evanescent Event : Using the Olympic City as a catalyst for change in post-industrial cities

Abstract

How can we become a progressive culture when we can not bear the thought of tearing our buildings down? Is our desire for permanence our greatest weakness? The architecture industry is slowly coming to terms with the future of buildings being designated ten or fifteen year buildings. What does this mean to the modern designer? At what point does a building lose its purpose? As we lose land area due to population growth, climate change, and other factors, the solution to a lack of land could be understanding how to properly demolish existing structures. If structures are built to be broken down, the process is more palatable and affordable, while offering its pieces as new material for use. This concept becomes preservation through memory, spatial cues, and academic rather than physical histories. Within these pages is a glance at a counterpoint to monumental buildings, and a proposal for the re-integration of sites and materials into the fabric from where they came. As a pinnacle of unused monuments, Olympic Stadiums and their associated villages are the structures of focus; have they not lost their purpose after three months of hosting Olympic and paralympic games? Olympic stadiums and their surrounding infrastructure systems seem to be just as expensive to maintain, and while their price tags are normally paid off by investors and developers, it is just as often that the burden falls onto local taxpayers, who could be facing the bill for up to thirty years, as was the case after the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. This thesis uses a site to study a proposal for a series of temporary homes; places it can inhabit without leveling local communities, exploiting taxpayers, or be a burden on local industries. As is the nature of temporary installments which are meant to be re-absorbed, the methods used for implementing a large-scale, responsive, miniature city are different depending on location. With Detroit as an initial study, event programs such as the Olympics are meant to be used as catalysts, inspiring community redevelopment, large-scale overhauls of city planning, gifts to the city in exchange for temporary land use, and the eventual dissolution of architecture into the landscape.