There's life in the old Olympic Park yet

Post-Olympics, typically all that remains are bloated multimillion-pound venues and an eerie silence. ‘The scale of the buildings and plazas is so huge and they are so disconnected from their surroundings, there is nothing you can do with them,’ says British-born, New York-based landscape architect James Corner. Corner is the man charged with transforming the 55-acre south plaza into part of the future Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which will open piecemeal from next year.

London is the first Olympic host city seriously to consider the post-Games impact on the surrounding urban environment, says Corner. It is largely thanks to the sustainable vision of Seb Coe that instead of becoming an epic wasteland, there is a strong plan in place for the Olympic Park’s future. The sports buildings will be scaled down: the wings will come off Zaha Hadid’s swooping Aquatics Centre, reducing its seating capacity from 17,500 to 2,500; the collapsible ‘flat-pack’ stadium could downsize from 80,000 to 25,000 seats (no decision about its final size or use has yet been made). And planned from the start is that the vast plaza in the south of the park, which was used to funnel 8.8 million visitors in and out of the Games, will be ripped up and given the 21st-century star-park treatment by Corner’s company, Field Operations.

Corner, 50, who lives in Manhattan with his Welsh wife Anne Marie and daughters Chloe, 20, and Olivia, 17, moved to the US in 1984. He had studied landscape architecture at Manchester’s Metropolitan University and did a brief stint with Richard Rogers, working on developing London’s Docklands, an experience he found dispiriting. ‘All the architects knew how to do was to put awnings on existing buildings; all the landscape architects knew how to do was put trees everywhere; all the traffic engineers knew how to do was to optimise getting cars in and out of the development. Our training didn’t work on a large scale. There was no comprehensive or holistic approach. That’s why I came to the US to study urban design.’ Battery Park City, the 92-acre park and miniature city on reclaimed land at the southern tip of Manhattan, became his model for a better solution.

Now Corner has made his own mark on Manhattan, as the landscape architect responsible for the city’s hugely popular new High Line park. Nearly four million visitors oohed and ahhed their way along its 1.5-mile stretch last year, and the park isn’t even finished yet (phase three, in which it sprouts a hanging garden, a children’s play area and a raised lookout, opens in 2014). The High Line is situated on an old elevated railway line that snakes through Manhattan’s Meatpacking and Chelsea districts, offering cinematic views of the Empire State Building, the Hudson River and the surrounding neighbourhoods. It hasn’t just attracted an incredible number of visitors to this once-grotty part of the city, it has spurred a massive urban regeneration with new stores, restaurants, hotels and incredible leaps in real-estate values. According to a study by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the value of residential property near the High Line has jumped 103 per cent since its development.

Bespoke parks are the new catalysts for urban transformation, says Corner. ‘Cities that want to be more competitive and attract tourists and new businesses are discovering that their calling card is the distinction of their public spaces. If they are just the same as everywhere else, they are not distinguishing themselves. That’s why landscape architects have boomed in the past decade; we are trained to do something one-off with the local ecology, as opposed to architects who tend to have one style that they transport from place to place.’

Six blocks from the end of the High Line, in Hell’s Kitchen — one of Manhattan’s last gritty neighbourhoods — is the headquarters of Field Operations. Next door to Corner’s elegant office in an old print factory are two huge truck depots, the noisy entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, the Long Island Rail Road train depot and a petrol station. To say that Corner thrives on gritty post-industrial landscapes is an understatement. Since the High Line, his 40-person team is now engaged in transforming the old Navy Pier in Chicago, rundown waterfront areas in Seattle and Miami, creating a new water-based city in Shenzhen, China, and transforming the massive Fresh Kills garbage dump in New York into a public attraction three times the size of Central Park.

In London, one of the biggest challenges of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is that it is set in one of the bleakest parts of the city. The urban views won’t be anywhere near as appealing as those from the High Line, or on the beachfront in Santa Monica, which Corner is also redeveloping. Instead, visitors will have views of the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre, the Lea River and Anish Kapoor’s 377ft Orbit tower, which is still a bit of a puzzle. Corner is politically correct when talking about the sculpture: ‘Um, I think it’s supposed to look like a trumpet facing the ground.’

Fortunately, the London Legacy Development Corporation’s brief for Corner was to focus on creating interest within the space itself. The result will be a series of ‘pleasure gardens’ — eight outdoor event rooms, each with its own character, which will double as concert, theatre, performance and corporate event spaces. Each will lead off from a different point along a tree-lined promenade, which Corner describes as ‘a little bit of a High Line-type space’. The promenade is to be a kind of modern, outdoor catwalk, with areas for repose, privacy, socialising and eating (it will be full of food kiosks). ‘It’s all about theatricalising social space,’ he says. ‘It’s like a sidewalk.’ One of the most popular areas of the High Line is a series of big wooden chaise longues: ‘We designed it so you could sit front and centre, or where it recedes into the planting. Either way, in front of you is this constant procession of people. Our job is a bit like stagecraft.’

The ‘event rooms’ off the main promenade in London will range in size from a huge lawn accommodating 20,000 people to smaller spaces for around 100, such as the water labyrinth whose jets will reconfigure as you run through them, a carousel, a theatre room, a play room, a music room and a set of stadium-style wooden steps extending over the top of Carpenter’s Road Lock (‘People can sit there and watch the views or take in the sun’). At the southern end will be a visitor centre with a large café, a roof deck and booths where tickets can be bought for trips up the Orbit or for events in the surrounding gardens.

It is well known that the Olympic Park sits on what was once a highly polluted industrial area. One million tons of soil were decontaminated to make the park safe for public use but, explains Corner, ‘the south park is actually a sealed site. Once you get past 30cm of soil there is a cap. You can’t go below that without remediating the soil.’ As a result, his High Line partner, the Dutch horticulturalist Piet Oudolf, has selected only shallow-rooting plants — his vision is all wild grasses and swathes of meadow and plants, which are as much about shape and texture as colour. ‘It will be seasonally very dynamic,’ promises Corner. ‘Every month it will have a different feel. In winter you don’t cut it down, you keep the texture, so it will be golden reddish brown.’ Each ‘room’ will be demarcated and enclosed by walls of wild grasses.