Smooth as Water, Strong as Steel: The Undulating Roof of London's Olympic Pool

The graceful, undulating design of London's Aquatic Center has a backbone of steel weighing more than 3,000 tons.

Zaha Hadid Architects

Inside, is a pool. *The* pool, really, the London Aquatic Center, where, beginning next Saturday, the best swimmers in the world will compete for those life-defining demarcations: gold, silver, and bronze.

Outside, it's an undulating wave of aluminum, supported by a structure of Red Lauro timber and more than 3,000 tons of steel. The shape -- "inspired by the fluid geometry of water in motion," according to Zaha Hadid Architects -- arches over three pools (one for diving, one for racing, and one for training) and some 2,500 seats. Two structural appendages will provide an additional 15,000 seats for the summer's games, and will then be dismantled, leaving behind the "legacy building" -- the permanent structure whose un-Olympic size should prove easier for London to maintain. It is the highest-capacity of the venues during the Olympics; it will reduce to the lowest.

The Olympic set-up:

Legacy mode:

The building's construction required the demolition of 11 industrial building and the removal of 160,000 metric tons of soil. (Also, strange but awesome factlet: According to ZHA, four skeletons from a pre-historical settlement were discovered during the excavation for the building's foundation.)

But what makes the building iconic is the roof, whose graceful, swooping curves belies the rugged interior, the massive frame of steel, held together with some 70,000 bolts. The whole thing is supported on only three points -- a wall at the south end and two concrete pillars at the north, and shaped by 10 north-south steel trusses. "The steelwork itself describes the architectural geometry -- loosely," Glenn Moorley, Zaha Hadid's project leader for the center explained to me.

Zaha Hadid Architects

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Smooth as Water, Strong as Steel: The Undulating Roof of London's Olympic Pool