Abstract

This paper develops and extends the propositions, first presented at Flow 1, concerning the relationships and correspondence between interiors and landscape. We examined these ideas in the context of the historic landscape of the Woodland Cemetery Stockholm and suggest that the contemporary city also offers such sites where interiority and landscape conjoin.

We argue that the Olympic Park in east London shares many characteristics with the Woodland Cemetery, such as the orchestration of topography, the dressing of surface and fabric, and the screening of players and activities from the city beyond in order to create a choreographed “world” within the world. Unlike the cemetery however, this contemporary example is about forgetting, about discontinuities and erasure and can be characterized, according to the writer and critic Iain Sinclair, in just such a manner.

Formed initially behind its defensive blue perimeter screen wall, the Olympic Park’s very conception is as an outpost of global civilization that has landed in the “wilderness” of the River Lea valley. Like a colonial enclave, its interior will offer spectacle and entertainment and, post- games bring civilization, or regeneration as it currently called, to the indigenous population. In pursuit of this aim the qualities of the existing site, a complex system of formal and informal patterns of human, animal, and plant activity were either ignored, excluded or modified as it was first cleared then subsequently re -made to conform to a desired image.

The Olympic Park seeks to address two different audiences, one global and the other local. The aim is that it will transcend the transient nature of its primary impetus through ideas of legacy in order to ensure longevity and local relevance. However, unlike the Woodland Cemetery, which integrates site, settings and cultural context, the Park supplants the existing in order to improve and regulate it to ensure compliance on the one hand, and if not- exclusion on the other.