Empty Nest Syndrome

That's the next Olympic stadium that architecture critics, professional and armchair alike, will be harping over four years from now, when the Games arrive in London. It's a curiosity that the Olympic Games have come to be defined in part by set-piece architecture. Beijing's success with Bird's Nest almost guarantees that the arms race will accelerate.

Among the many Olympic post-mortems you read today, please consider this piece I've written for the Guardian Web site about architecture that competes as the Olympians themselves do and why it's unhealthy.

On a side note, now that people everywhere are familiar with the work of Herzog & de Meuron (they are the architects behind the Bird's Nest), more people will relate with the residual anger I still feel over the blundered episode that was the University of Texas's near miss with a Herzog design.