With the Sochi Winter Olympics done and gone, the same question that invariably arises at the end of every Olympic production comes to the fore. What will become of the architecture constructed in anticipation of the featured sporting events? Discussions about the long-term prospects of Sochi’s Olympic architecture have taken on an especially feverish tone — after all, this year’s winter games cost $51 billion, more than any other event in Olympic history. The vast sums of money spent to construct an Olympic Park containing one massive stadium and five smaller arenas, and a nearby constellation of ski resort villages and athletic tracks known as the Mountain Cluster, whose purpose was to accommodate athletes and tourists, sensationalize the potential failure of Russian investment in Olympic architecture. Now a post-Olympic town, Sochi will have to reconcile the architectural imprint left by the games with local cultural and economic realities.
“World record-setting projects in architecture and urban design rarely pay off for host nations,” wrote Kriston Capps in the Guardian, shortly after the Beijing Olympics closed in 2008. “Lack of use, expensive upkeep and bewildering construction costs have plagued cities that have undertaken similarly grand missions for the Olympics,” he explained, highlighting Athens to prove his point. Greek officials spent more than $13 billion to renovate existing stadiums and hire Santiago Calatrava to build a complex roof structure, only to find themselves considering the demolition of these unused post-Olympic structures several years later.
In Sochi, however, officials began planning to dismantle some of the stadiums in Olympic Park before the games even began. And unlike many past host cities that construct Olympic buildings around existing athletic venues, Sochi had no winter sports infrastructure when construction began in 2008. Thus nearly all the arenas, resorts, and residences built for the current games are completely new developments. Mountain Cluster, located 60 miles from Sochi proper, is an imitation of European architectural styles nestled into a hillside that was bare six years ago. Likewise, marshland located 20 miles outside Sochi was paved over with concrete to make room for Olympic Park, planned by sports architects Populous, who also designed the games’ main venue, Fisht Stadium. The Olympic sporting events did not take place in Sochi; they took place near Sochi, in a swamp and a forest. The arenas that housed these events were not designed for any specific site — and thus, these products of hurried design and rapid construction might stand to outlive the Olympics, precisely because their generic mediocrity also makes them multiuse.
“If the idea for the Sochi Olympics was to create something aesthetically interesting,” observed architectural theorist and historian Grigory Revzin, “then the project has failed.” Revzin, author of “Russian Architecture at the Turn of the 21st Century” and an architecture critic for the Moscow-based Kommersant newspaper, believes that aesthetic merit was a low priority for Russian authorities in Sochi. Rather, he argues that they sought to build a space that looked like it could be located anywhere. “The idea at the Olympic Park was to create the semblance of a global place,” said Revzin, before pointing out other international structures that were replicated in Sochi. Bolshoi Ice Stadium, designed by the Omsk-based firm Mostovik, is a copy, he explained, of Paul Andreu’s 2007 opera house in Beijing; and the centerpiece, Fisht Stadium, with electrical wires sticking out of walls and unfinished interior detailing, looks “more like a ruin than a new stadium, like it has been heavily used for the past 20 years.”
The Olympic Park buildings’ uniform use of typical curvilinear architectural forms, plated in the usual Modernist-inflected glass and steel, is a riff on the international norm for monumental corporate architecture. But if the prevailing use of utterly standardized, ordered architectural tropes is meant to suggest that the arenas in Sochi are just like Olympic arenas outside of Russia, then the results again fail. As Revzin suggests, these buildings are meant to be international in style, but they are not world-class architecture. He referenced Herzog & de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest stadium, which drew international acclaim at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and said, “Since the Olympics are meant to attract international attention, one would expect some kind of exceptional architecture for the event. We don’t have anything of the sort among the Sochi stadiums.”
While Fisht Stadium is slated to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, some of the smaller venues inside Olympic Park are said to await permanent relocation to winter sports destinations across Russia. “I’ve heard that Adler Speedskating Stadium will be deconstructed and built up somewhere else in Russia,” said Rob Hornstra, a founder of the website The Sochi Project and author of “An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus,” who spent the past 10 years working as a photojournalist in Sochi. When construction began in 2008, Russian officials planned to disassemble and relocate some of Olympic Park’s smaller arenas, reports Kommersant. Plans held that Shayba Arena, the hockey venue designed by a German engineering firm, would be taken apart in Sochi, its constituent parts shipped to Stavropol and reassembled there as the city’s central hockey and skating arena. Similarly, the Ice Cube Curling Arena is built to disassemble and plans are in the works to repurpose it into a mall — whether or not customers will arrive to shop at the commercial complex is unclear. Ultimately, the town’s subtropical climate, its storied identity as the most popular summertime resort in the former Soviet Union, and the absence of a devoted winter sports community render the arenas unusable in their current capacities, according to Hornstra. Revzin agrees. “The arenas are simply are not fit to exist in that setting,” he said. His believes that the structures will eventually stand empty until the authorities relocate them. And precisely because the stadiums are generic by design, many can be dismantled and relocated with relative ease.
Revzin reserves cautious optimism for the post-Olympic fate of the Mountain Cluster buildings. “There has never been a high-quality ski resort in Russia, it simply didn’t exist, and now, even though it’s not fully ready, the infrastructure for it is there,” he said. Though the architecture of Rosa Khutor, a ski resort owned by businessman Vladimir Potanin, is for Revzin a “trivial” exercise in historical pastiche, the nearby Mountain Village resort is “actually quite interesting.” Both resorts, he believes, will be popular with Muscovites, who are three hours away from these slopes rather than visa applications and six hours removed from the Swiss Alps. Ultimately, these ski resorts will have a clientele to serve after the Olympic visitors are gone. Revzin believes that they will encourage the local tourism industry — but the arenas will not. If Russia successfully moves these buildings, Sochi could be the first host city to find a functional solution to the pervasive problem of post-Olympic architecture. But which of the arenas will eventually be moved from Sochi is still unclear; authorities, it seems, have not drawn up any conclusive plans. “I believe that’s what they say will happen,” said Hornstra, “but you never know — it’s Russia.”
