The 2024 Paris Olympics: More than sport

Each and every Olympics features different aspects of architectural design, and without a doubt the 2024 Paris Olympics has set new benchmarks for its amalgam of world famous landmarks, landscape and sports events.

Architectural and landscape designers won’t be on any podiums in 2024 but an interesting sidebar to the history of the Olympics is that from 1912 to 1948, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) handed out medals across five creative arts categories including architecture, painting, sculpture, literature and music. 

As reported in ArchitectureAu.com this echoed the ancient Olympics, which had competitions for music, singing and public speaking. 

The Stockholm Games in 1912 allowed both built work and speculative designs to enter the first architecture competition, as well as designs for town planning, with Eugène-Edouard Monod and Alphonse Laverriére winning a Gold medal for their project ‘Building Plan of a Modern Stadium’.

Fast forwarding to 2024, a vestige of this celebration of architecture and landscape - less focused on sporting venues - is the Archi Folies educational project at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. 

The 55-hectare Parc de La Villette to the north of Paris is already a site for 26 bright red folies created by Bernard Tschumi Architects.  (Source: lavillette.com)

Organised by the French Ministry of Culture the Archi Folies project called on Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture (ENSA) students from across France, including landscape architecture students, to design and build 20 temporary pavilions using sustainable materials and techniques. Each pavilion is based on partnering with a sports federation and in September, after the Paralympic Games, many of these will be dismantled and reinstalled in the territory where the schools are located. 

London-based landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman has worked on reimagining the landscape of the Eiffel Tower. Read more about their project and access a project sheet at gp-b.com Image: © Gustafson Porter + Bowman.

Naturally the most enduring symbol of Paris is the Eiffel Tower, itself an emblematic folie dating from the International Exhibition of Paris of 1889. 

Not surprisingly the Eiffel Tower and surrounding area, along with other landmarks, has also been the focus of concerted plans to reinvigorate the already iconic landscape of Paris through imaginative redesign concepts, as seen above, and contests.

Hungry for more reading? Dezeen.com has been running an investigative editorial series titled Olympic Impact with a focus on sustainability issues. Or if you’re more academically inclined you might be interested in landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann’s 2022 book Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health.