OAKA, Olympic Stadium and Olympic Park
Athens, Greece
Santiago Calatrava

Santiago Calatrava makes a gigantic structure seem weightless and creates a telegenic national symbol in the process

© Alan Karchmer

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By Sam Lubell and Joann Gonchar, AIA

With about 3.9 billion people watching the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the Olympic Stadium was, for two weeks in August, likely the most widely televised building in the world. The global exposure gave Greece, host of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and a country that has experienced new political stability and increasing prosperity in recent decades, a chance to demonstrate its growing prominence in Europe. Therefore, the stadium needed to serve as a dynamic symbol, not only for the games, but for Greece as a whole.

The Greek Ministry of Culture chose Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, FAIA. His assignment was to transform—with the addition of a roof—a fairly conventional 75,000-seat open-air stadium built in 1979. The new roof was to provide shading and a signature element visible miles away. In addition to being the site of the lavish opening and closing ceremonies, the stadium hosted track and field events and soccer games.

Besides designing the $350 million main stadium, Calatrava was in charge of unifying and reorganizing the surrounding 250-acre Olympic Sports Complex, which already contained some sports facilities. Although Athens was selected as host city in 1997, political, legal, and bureaucratic obstacles prevented award of the design contract until October 2001, leaving less than three years to design and build the complex.
Calatrava saw his main role as that of urban planner. “It is a small city—a city of sports,” he says of the complex, located in Marousi, a northern suburb of Athens. To give the site cohesion, he established a central pedestrian route linking the stadium and an existing velodrome, for which he also designed a new roof. He also created a Plaza of Nations, a curved, amphitheaterlike gathering place; the Agora, a modular, light-steel-vaulted structure defining the plaza’s northern perimeter; the Wall of Nations, an 856-foot-long kinetic screen; as well as entrance canopies, pools, and tree-lined walkways.

The stadium roof is this composition’s most striking element. Calatrava topped the stadium with a pair of 997-foot-long steel, and polycarbonate-clad, “leaves,” which join at a single point at each end of the field. Each leaf is composed of a 236-foot-tall arch attached by cables to a lower torque tube, which in turn supports a series of transverse ribs. The new structure touches the ground at only four points—at massive “shoes,” more than 21 feet tall and 36 feet long, where the upper arch and torque tube merge.

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Formal name of Project:
OAKA, Olympic Stadium and Olympic Park

Location:
Athens, Greece

Gross square footage:
1.374 million sq. ft.

Total project cost:
$350 million

Client:
Ministry of Culture, Greece

Architect:
Santiago Calatrava Llc
Parkring 11
8002 Zurich, Switzerland
Phone +41-44-204 50 00
Fax +41-44-204 50 01
www.calatrava.com