In contrast to Beijing's monumental building projects, future Olympic hosts like London shouldn't think that bigger is better

Minna Ninova
guardian.co.uk

As the dust settles on the Olympic track this week and things in Beijing go back to normal (so to speak), Chairman Mao will smile enigmatically from his portrait perch over a city transformed by architecture. By now, millions of eyes have grown accustomed to the Olympics' awesome landmarks whose monumentality is intended to inspire us, to give us a setting where we may together celebrate the majesty of sport and to remind us who's boss … er … host.

If hosting the Olympics was China's way of shoring up its strength and visibility on the international stage, than the architecture was the look-at-me muscle flexing that brought together aesthetics and political will in a peculiar dance of neo-perestroika. This time however, the meaning is quite literal - Beijing is under reconstruction. The individual structures may well represent the creative point of view of a few architects, but the big picture says much more about China's determination to spell out its political ambition using the language of urban design.

There is little doubt that the visual sensation of the massive, perfectly flat Olympic plaza and surrounding centerpiece architecture is a curated one. We are supposed to be stunned and humbled by a project that neatly manages to dwarf the already formidable Tiananmen Square. But not only is the building blitz in direct opposition to the endangered traditional small-scale urban fabric of the city, it also smacks of the kind of propaganda-driven totalitarian urban projects that have been discredited in the west, no thanks to their association with cruelty and oppression.

To outsiders, then, Beijing's urban master planning might seem questionable, and rightly so. How is it that big name architects like Herzog and de Meuron (designers of that rara avis, the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium) and Rem Koolhaas (whose CCTV tower has all the subtly of the Death Star) are given such extreme creative liberties in a country where the individual expression of its citizens is routinely suppressed? What is the role of avant-garde design and its practitioners in rigidly structured political systems? And, while we're at it, where are future host cities supposed to go from here?

Between the heavy-handedness of Beijing's architectural gestures and the white elephant structures in host cities past, future host cities have precious little room for grand design maneuvers. The most promising approach looks at Olympics infrastructure as a reflection of what they really mean for a city: a splashy, but ultimately temporary event. To that end, construction has begun in London on a convertible structure by HOK Sport architects for the 2012 games that will be rescaled from 80,000 to 25,000 seats once the show leaves town. In Chicago, meanwhile, the architect Ben Wood has proposed a fully temporary stadium for that city's 2016 Olympic bid, drawing up plans for what is essentially an anti-monument.

Whether this reflects the west's ambivalence toward Beijing-style architectural symbolism or a more serious commitment to sustainable construction remains to be seen. Cities, especially the kind that Patrick Geddes termed "world cities" in 1915, are in constant competition for prominence in the global economic system, hence the Olympic bidding frenzy. But in the race to stand out and brand themselves, cities should dispense with Beijing's "bigger is better" attitude and leave the car-centric, mega-city sprawl of highways to the Houstons and Brasílias of the world.