A Century Development Of Olympic Architecture

The background, motivation and significance of the dissertationEver since Pierre GuBaidan and his colleagues restored the Olympic Games at the end of the19th century, the modern Olympic Games have evolved for a hundred years during which they experienced both hard and exciting moments. Although according to the history, the 1916's, 1940's and 1944's Olympic Games were cancelled because of the war, although frequently chaotic arose from the inside of the organization of the Olympic Games and some exte(?)al pressure arose from outside of the organization, the modern Olympic Games are still regarded as one of the few successes which elaborate the internationalism. Starting from a humble, indefinite beginning, the Olympic Games gradually grow into a marvelous sporty event in the world; nowadays, not any other event can compare with it in the style, scale or in the complexity of the organization. Each past Olympic Games is an important opportunity for exchanging the ideas in science and cultural, and it also provides a giant stage to the hosting city, demonstrating the hosting city's history, culture as well as the resident's expectation to the audience of the world.Furthermore, targeting on the different basic characteristics of different games, the constructions of different Olympic Games alter accordingly. Each Olympic Game is also an opportunity to put many new ideas in architecture into practice, which significantly contributes to the history of architecture.Through a century's practice and value agglomeration, the constructions for Olympic Games develop a marvelous and unique scene both in the history of the world sports and in the history of architecture. It stands in the cutting edge of modem science and technology, and massive utilizations of advanced science and technology are involved due to its special characteristics.He constructions of Olympic Games have widespread influences which greatly surpass other types of constructions because of their concentrations on the up to date reflection of the society, economy, culture, and techniques, which are recognized by their unique artistic charms in the architectural history.This dissertation focuses on investigating the constructions of summer Olympics', but does not include the constructions of winter Olympics. The reason lies in two-fold: 1.) compared with the summer Olympics, winter Olympics started nearly 30 years later. Although similar to the summer Olympics in idea and culture, its characteristic projects placed a biglimitation on the style of the building and the regional distribution, so that the concrete performance of the constructions between the summer Olympics and the winter Olympics was very different; 2.) the summer Olympics' integrity reflected the evolvement of modern Olympic Games and the growth of modern sports industry. Also many achievements and open problems appearing in the history of the summer Olympics have manifested the characteristics of developing modern architectures for sport.Although quite a lot research has been done on the modern Olympic Games, there were comparatively much less work done systematically on revealing the evolvement of the architecture of modern Olympic Games and the contribution of those architects who constructed the modern Olympic buildings, especially in the area of manifesting the series of challenges and reformations the Olympics Games has been facing since the 1980s. Taken into consideration that the Olympic Games were conducted once four years in a different city all around the world, it is inevitable that the architectures for different Olympic Games have shown certain gradualness and regionalism.Since the contributions that architects put to the architectures of the Olympic Games form a slow, but stable process, nothing can clearly symbolize its accumulation development. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on summarizing the evolvement of the architectures for the Olympic Games from all previous years historically and simultaneously emphasizing the uniqueness of an individual construction. The motivation of the dissertation is to elaborate the evolvement and development of the architectures for Olympic Games, aiming at discovering the evolution of this new cluster of architectures via detailed research. As a result of limited resources, I do not have personal experience on the architectures of the Olympic Games. The skeleton in this dissertation is based on research articles (Official Olympic Report), which were separately published by the government after each Olympic Game. We would like acknowledge IOC here for their help, who provided the Official Olympic Reports and other supplementary materials that are beneficial to our research. In addition, figures in the dissertation without explicit sources all refer to the Official Olympic Reports.MethodologyThis dissertation combines the researches of the culture, sports, history and architecture of the Olympic Games, counts the previous achievements in the research of Olympic spirit and sports, and systematically carries out the research on the architecture of the Olympic Games both from the chronologic view and the physical view.? Historically: from 1896 till now, the architectures of modern Olympic Games have shown its chronological characteristic along the time. By using the historical research method, it not only locates the architecture of the Olympic Games to the history, but also traces back to relate the characteristics of the Olympic architectures to the social background at that time for a better understand.? Crossing multiple disciplines: During the evolution process of the Olympic Games, besides the architects, the basic requirements placed on the architecture from athletic competition, and the rule formulated by the IOC played very important roles. The evolution of the regulations of the IOC indicates the evolution of the Olympic Games in essence agrees with the development of the society. Therefore to better study the architectures of the Olympic Games, great attentions need to be paid on the evolution of sports, the standards and regulations set by the IOC, all of which are closely related topics.Organization of the Dissertation:The dissertation targets on the evolvement of the Olympic architectures together with the analysis of some concrete historical cases. The dissertation has been divided into two halves, which are logically related. The first half is organized as follows: first, the historically evolvement of the Olympic Games over the past 100 years was illustrated via 4 important phases. Then it concluded the characteristics on the space layout of the Olympic architectures. Finally the technical and economical influences on the Olympic architectures were analyzed in detail. Within the second half, for each of the four characteristic stages, detailed elaborations were launched to cover the unique characteristics of the Olympic architectures in each stage chronologically.