SPORTING CHANCES.

The Olympic Games are supposed to be the most colossal international deployment of humankind's resources apart from a major war. (Appropriately perhaps, as the Games began with exercises like boxing, throwing, running and so on, which were part of a soldier's training in Ancient culture; now they have been supplemented by archery, shooting and synchronized swimming.) Huge quantities of physical, mental and economic resources are poured into a quadrennial orgy of chauvinism and international good fellowship, gluttony and athleticism, ferocious competition and generous sportsmanship, all conducted to the deep, insistent beat of the megabucks of international television companies.

So much money is poured into the Games that, sensibly used, cash from what is essentially a leisure activity can transform the host city. Barcelona's brilliant use of Olympic resources to restructure itself (AR August 1992) is the most dramatic example, but it was not followed by similarly imaginative approaches in Seoul or Atlanta. Sydney seems different. The city will undoubtedly be transformed permanently by the Games, but not in the same way as Barcelona. There, sites all over the city were carefully chosen so that the whole urban tissue was reinvigorated.

Sydney has chosen to concentrate most of its resources on one site, at the demographic centre of the vast amorphous conurbation. Here is a daring attempt to set up the basis of a focus which will perhaps eventually come to balance the world famous centre with the Opera House and CBD. Homebush may be based on leisure and sport, but it could become multi-dimensional, the more so because the initial design has been founded on green principles. It will be both ironic and appropriate if the great city gains new life from leisure, from sport, which sometimes seems to be an alternative Australian religion.

Like the Hanover Expo (AR September), the Sydney Olympic Games are intended to be green and to extend ideas of eco-friendly planning and architecture. Facilities are scattered around Sydney, but the main centre is at Homebush Bay, on the famous harbour some 15 kilometres west of the Opera House, although it is actually the demographic centre of Greater Sydney. A famously neglected industrial area, it was variously a brickworks, an abattoir, naval armaments arsenal and a rubbish dump.

Clearly, the initial task was to get rid of the mess, but there has been no attempt to transform the place totally. For instance, one of the largest marks of the industrial past, a clay quarry -- the Brickpit -- has been preserved as a great crater 15m deep, because it was found to be a breeding ground for the rare golden bell frog. It has been lightly landscaped, and forms part of the park that surrounds much of the games centre and separates it from the Olympic village to the north. The green area is to grow to about 900 hectares by 2010, and will combine the normal elements of a metropolitan park with a nature reserve which includes restored mangrove salt wetlands along the harbour. The Olympic complex itself is intended to be a permanent urban core in the middle of the Millennium Park.

The planning group led by Lawrence Nield took several key decisions at an early stage. One of the most important was that transport of people should as far as possible be done without cars. (Private cars are not allowed on the site, and the sports buildings are serviced by a ring road.) In the centre of the complex is the station, which is reached rapidly from central Sydney, and dramatically too, for the line goes underground one and a half kilometres from the site, and you are delivered to a luminous vault (AR September 1998) that opens to the main new public space, Olympic Place. Visitors by bus are delivered to each end of the piazza either direct from the CBD or from Homebush Ferry Wharf on the Harbour.

The Place, which is in some ways a forecourt to Stadium Australia (p54) and the Sydney Superdome (p57), grows out of the main axis of the site, what Nield calls the cardo of the sports city, which runs roughly south-east/north-west. In so doing, it cuts through the grid of the abattoir fields which has in part been retained (at least on the eastern side of the site) to act as an ordering device for the smaller buildings, and for the agricultural structures that surround the station and the Sydney cattle showground (which is to be used as the baseball stadium during the Olympics).

Nield and his team (working with American landscape architect George Hargreaves) evolved a plan which had three conceptual layers. The red layer is the organization of the whole, and its detailing, including the strange partly solar-powered lighting pylons which illuminate the piazza designed by Tonkin Zulaikha Architects, the bus shelters by Denton Corker Marshall and the lavatories by Durbach Block Murcutt. The green layer draws the vegetation of the surrounding parkland into the centre of the complex as fingers of planting. As well as native flora (some of the existing trees are surprisingly large), there are exotics like the jacarandas and mongolian plums which add colour to, for instance, the little avenue (Nield's decumanus) which runs from station to piazza.

The blue layer of the plan is of course water. Already, the site had three creeks which wind down to the Harbour. At the ends of the piazza are water devices by Hargreaves. The northern one, beautifully carved into the earth, acts as reservoir for surface water and cleanses it using plants and a huge fountain. At the southern end, fountains spray over the paths -- cooling devices somewhat similar to ones used at the Seville Expo (AR June 1992). The mottoes of what Australians describe as the Green Games are 'reduce, reuse and recycle'. The Homebush complex gives lessons in all of them.