Cross tracks

Abstract

When looking at the current management structures surrounding large scale temporary events we see that they are often in the hands of few organizers (Olympic committee, FIFA, FIS) yet the actual impact is often felt by the local community and biodiversity. After the impact continues when often these areas fall derelict or at least are underused. This can be seen when looking at Beijing Olympic 2022, FIFA World Cup 2022 and possibly Fis Planica 2023. There is an evident need for restructuring the management and building process of these events. This project discusses event architecture and how structures can be built to support the event as well as the local community further on. The purpose is to examine the current building process and to illustrate an alternative to a permanent building process by using temporary and mobile structures that reflect their program and local identities in their visual form. The project started from a personal fondness towards cross country skiing and uses one of these events as a case study to illustrate the larger topic of creating event spaces with its problems and opportunities at a manageable scale. Some facets of the project aim to be more universal such as the discussion between added flexibility and local identity as well as implementing plasticity to the surrounding permanent building stock whereas some are specific to the local case study namely the chosen structures, material use, location and apperance of the structures. These facets were studied and discussed at different points during the project. In the thesis the normative and usually top down process of building permanent event structures for temporal use is mapped. The concept of temoparlity is later investigated through the case study of the cross country ski world cup event in Falun. This is done by exploring how small scale structures that are permanent in material use, temporary in placement and arrangement and mobile in their nature. The case study brings together short term and long term needs for both the event and community in five structures that all influence different topics (social, cultura, commercial, public and private) in the area and have different apperances based on their programmatic needs and physical context whilst still remaining felxible enough to support changes in use or placement.