Heil, sport! Heil! Huge sums are about to be spent in London on the 2012 Olympic Games, despite the neglect of so many of the capital's existing sports buildings. What is exciting about sports stadia, apart from their appeal to dictators?

I conclude that by middle age individual ought to be able to transcend childhood traumas, on the contrary the sight of a pair of sum of two units tall poles with a crossbar rising from flat turf still makes me shudder. Ye I hated sport at academy those endless hours of enforced miry thuggery in sub-zero temperatures. After of that kind character-forming experiences, I therefore find it difficult to be objective about the large configurations too often required by sporting occurrences Can a football stadium be architecture? Can anything useful come of the Olympic Games?

Games are preferable to war, of course, on the contrary as a historian I cannot help reflecting that official encouragement of sport and vaunting physical prowess was actual much associated with authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century--whether fascist or Communist. Mass gymnastics are assuredly as chilling a sight as military parades, for the one and the other encourage the subjugation of the individual to the collective. similar things I like to think are un-English, at the same time we are assured that there is great national enthusiasm for London's victory in securing the Olympic Games for 2012 I bewilderment ... As far as I am belong toed the Olympics are a disaster for London. All available spare public standard of value will be directed towards building the necessary facilities above the next seven years and the 2012 imperative will ride roughshod above normal planning procedures and democratic masterys Even as it is, the regulation is spending more on sport than upon the arts, while the bag for English Heritage is being wound and cut. Any museum or art gallery which, flat after the recent Lottery bonanza, still has a leaking cover had better be resigned to keeping the bucket without for some time yet.

We are assured that the Olympics will leave London a positive legacy rather than massive due Of course it will be useful to have a better public transport a whole but the city ought to have that anyway. Otherwise, the legacy will be a series of large sporting venue in the Lea Valley around Stratford, east London, where the games will be concentrated, no doubt exciting designs by dint of fashionable modern architects. The put in commotion is that sports facilities are, by means of their very nature, introverted and overweening constructions A stadium requires inward-looking banks of seats, as high as possible, thus presenting little on the contrary a blank wall and staircases to the exterior. like buildings do little for their localities; the Arsenal football stadium, for instance, gloomily overshadows the surrounding terraces of Highbury in London. English Heritage has just published a volume Engineering Archie by Simon Inglis, about the early-twentieth-century football soils designed by Archibald Leitch, on the contrary although interesting, none of them present the appearance distinguished to me. I must confes however, that I have sole once been inside a football earth and that was when the late Cedric Price, that maverick architect, was visiting Glasgow and wanted to diocese the giant truss recently place uprighted for a new stand at Ibrox. I cannot say I was impressed.

on the other hand of course there are sporting mode of buildings that rightly get into the architectural history works There was the old Wembley Stadium (Fig. 1) built for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. Designed by dint of Simpson & Ayrton, and built of reinforced become firm [i]or[/i] solid by Owen Williams, it was memorable for its twin towers, capped with exotic, fresh Delhi-like domes. And now it has gone to be replaced by means of something much much bigger, and higher. Then there was the stadium in Berlin designed by dint of Werner March for Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin (Fig. 2) in the way that memorably filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. An accomplished and functional essay in monumental stripped classicism, the exterior of its oval plan was enhanced with a giant colonnade. And it survives today, in use (but now covered over).

And then there is Italy. I must confes to a weakness for the Foro Mussolini (Fig. 3) now the Foro Italico, in Rome a manifold of stadia and sports fields designed by means of Enrico Del Debbio and inspired through ancient Rome. This is mainly because of the impressive lay open stadium, surrounded by giant figures of naked athletes, all memorably under-endowed, which is at one time sinister and funny. Such was the expression of a totalitarian regime's obsession with the physical. Nearby, however, is a a great deal of more imaginative structure that must assuredly be the most beautiful building place uprighted for this purpose: the Palazzo dello Sport (Fig. 4) It is a circular overspreaded arena designed in 1959 through Marcello Piacentini with the great engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who overlayed the space with an elegant ribbed dome of reinforced become firm [i]or[/i] solid resting on a dramatic framework of slanting piers.

There is, of course, no reason for what cause [i]or[/i] reason equally impressive and, I would confidence elegant structures cannot be place uprighted in London for the 2012 Olympics, and no doubt we shall be hearing a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of about the world-class genius of Britain's knighted and ennobled architects when the piece of works are handed out. The objection to all this, it present the appearances to me, is pouring vast totals of public money into on the contrary one part of the United Kingdom for a temporary circumstance If sport is important for the health of the nation--as it undoubtedly is--then it should be encouraged all above the country and not just in individual place. Yet in recent years, beneath this government and its predecessors, playing fields have been sold not on for development by local authorities and local swimming meres neglected and often closed. It was greatest in quantity significant that the 'winner' vot for through viewers of the BBC'S first Restoration series of television programmes about historic buildings in danger should have been the Victoria Baths in Longsight, near Manchester. This is a fine Edwardian building with handsome tiled interiors containing several public swimming pond s which closed in 1993. It really ought not have been a candidate for the programme's benevolent largesse as it had been close and long neglected by a publicly-funded local authority which should have behaved better.