An Aztec-tinged makeover topped with a curly-cut crown: inside the glittering £1.3bn Olympia reboot | Build

TThe money spent to redevelop London’s Olympia Exhibition Center is a set of stairs and escalators that rise upward, Aztec temple style, into a soaring atrium nestled between the massive barrel vaults of the original exhibition halls. In a modern homage to its historic predecessors, the atrium is also crowned by a fan-like, curly glass vault, its paper folds suggesting shimmering, dazzling modernity, and a cubic zirconia crown set among heritage-cut diamonds.

Looming behind the Crown are what look like a set of cylindrical towers, but are actually the rounded ends of a terraced office block, with fantastic views of London, from Wembley to Crystal Palace. The views are already being enjoyed by staff at the Premier League’s media production arm, which has a trademark mini-football pitch on its expansive terrace.

Effortlessly accommodating scenes as disparate as Miss World and the Chemical Brothers, Olympia has long greased the wheels of commerce and culture. The Great Hall, a massive confection of iron and glass embodying the power of Victorian engineering, has seen everything from cat shows and dog shows, to concerts, sporting events, military tournaments and a plethora of trade shows promoting everything from cars to chocolate.

The crown jewel of the Olympia Trade Show was (and still is) the Ideal Home Show, founded by the Daily Mail in 1908, which featured mock homes filled with the latest home appliances. But nothing could rival the “Luminous Water Celebrations” of Imre Kiralfy, the legendary 19th-century Hungarian artistic director, who flooded the Great Hall to choreograph a tribute to Venice’s “The Mermaid,” featuring a fleet of barges and gondolas.

In the tradition of the huge exhibition halls made famous at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Olympia developed into a kind of architectural nougat containing a variety of pieces from different eras. The Great Hall, the largest enclosed space in England at the time of its construction in 1885, and the adjacent Pillar Hall, where Vivienne Westwood held her first fashion show, were designed by Henry Coe, a disciple of George Gilbert Scott, the prolific exponent of the Gothic Revival. The National Hall, a more modest version of the barrel-domed Great Hall, was completed in 1923, while in 1929, Joseph Emberton, one of Britain’s leading architects of the interwar period, was commissioned to design the Empire Hall (now Olympia Central), its modernist jazz facade extending along Hammersmith Road like something out of a Poirot episode.

Thanks to its history and the drama of its architecture, Olympia reigned supreme for much of the 20th century. But eventually, it began to lose out to newer start-ups, particularly the logistically efficient but drearily soulless Excel Center in the Docklands. Acquired by real estate firm Yoo Capital in 2017, it has rebooted and expanded at great expense, a strategy that involves shedding unwanted overhangs, polishing up basic historic structures, and then doing amazing things on shiny new plantings. At a cost of £1.3bn, the redesign took almost a decade of work by Heatherwick Studio and fellow architects SPPARC.

Olympia lies in a triangular area of ​​land between Hammersmith and Holland Park, covering the same area as neighboring Westfield. But if you weren’t a visitor or viewer, it was quite isolated, like a city-state, like the Vatican in west London or Monaco. “When we first visited in 2017, the place was a kilometer in circumference, and if you didn’t have a ticket, that was it,” says Elliot Postma of Heatherwick Studio. “And so all of our early discussions were about how do we create a public domain where there is none?”

In theory, there is a whiff of Battersea Power Station in the concerted attempt to turn West London’s unfashionable environment into a ‘destination’. No one ever said ‘let’s go for a drink at Olympia’, but now viewers can choose from a range of F&B outlets (developer speak F&B). These line the raised atrium below the curly glass crown. “Will it be enough to tempt the Chelsea group?” Tatler Thinking Society magazine.

As it turns out, the crown is just the cherry on top of a very chunky development cake, which is crammed with more than half a million square feet of office space, 30 restaurants and bars, two hotels, a conference centre, a gym, a 3,800-capacity music and events venue, and London’s largest purpose-built theater in 50 years after the National on Southbank. There’s even a new secondary school, Wetherby Bembridge School, which opened last September, occupying the refurbished shell of a multi-storey car park originally designed by Joseph Emberton in 1937. All of which adds to the appeal of a recast Olympia as a city within a city, no longer just for lanyard wearers.

Emberton has achieved a kind of immortality in the form of the Emberton Walk, a high-level route that includes the elevated atrium and an internal street that runs beneath the office building and connects with another set of Aztec-scale escalators and escalators on Hammersmith Road. “It’s a new public street, sitting on the shoulders of these Victorian buildings, and literally building on what the Victorians did, with the same level of ambition,” Postma says.

Emberton Walk is designed as an open public thoroughfare (time will tell how open it will be), running through the site, providing access to offices, performance space, shops, restaurants and theatre. Yoo’s website shows a very stylish crowd of office workers, theatergoers, shoppers, revelers and buskers enjoying the various amenities, bathed in the ever-present pink glow of early June. But in the meantime, while things are going well – the theater is scheduled to open next year – the inner street turns into a somewhat lifeless tunnel, animated by a migraine-inducing digital ceiling, its screen pulsing like a giant lava lamp.

The new additions bear the approval of Thomas Heatherwick, designer of London’s infamously aborted Garden Bridge and Google’s massive UK headquarters in King’s Cross that was nearing completion. Heatherwick has a well-documented aversion to “boring” architecture, as demonstrated in his Humanist Manifesto published in 2023. The result is a tendency to imitate Tolkien on everything he touches. Most of his buildings will be in his homeland of Middle-earth.

In Olympia, folded motifs prevail: the ceilings are zigzag, the walls are zigzag, the balustrades are barbed-like, and even the door handles are curly cut. This is ostensibly inspired by the end glass walls of the Great Hall, which feature vertical faces to improve structural stability. In striving not to be boring, it’s all a bit frenetic and jazzy, but the muscular history of Coe and Emberton acts as a calming foil.

Given the size of the program and the challenges it faces — Olympia had to remain open during construction — some changes could be transformative. The new logistics center streamlines and streamlines operations, taking the movement of trucks and equipment off the street. Olympia Road, the main frontage of the site, was reconfigured as a landscaped street, revealing Coe’s Italianate facades in all their Victorian glory, with a restored sculptural panel featuring Greek agricultural deities (the Great Hall was intended to outshine Islington’s Royal Agricultural Hall).

Statues of Demeter and Persephone view London in a very different way than they did in 1885, but with the tinkling of a lover’s spectacles under Heatherwick’s crown, the newly plumped Olympia is still synonymous with the spectacle. So, in some ways, nothing has changed.