Two venues at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro—the 12,000-seat Future Arena, which is hosting handball, and the 15,000-seat Aquatic Stadium, which is hosting swimming and water polo—will be dismantled and rebuilt into entirely new buildings following the games. The Future Arena will be taken down and transformed into four state-run schools in the host city, while the Aquatic Stadium will be converted into two smaller water sports venues, both of which will include Olympic-size swimming pools.
How might Rio’s reliance on “nomadic architecture”—that is, buildings that can be taken apart and then transformed into other structures in other locations—impact the city’s Olympic legacy? We asked David Fannon, architect, building scientist, and assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University.
