The Olympic torch travels from city to city, the athletes do too, but the sports facilities that cities spend millions of dollars designing and building stay put. Once the Games end, many of the buildings are left sitting idle. Now imagine if the sports complexes, like the torch itself, could be transported from place-to-place, too.

It’s this idea that spurred six Ryerson Master of Architecture students to come up with a design concept that reuses and temporarily adds on to pre-existing sports and leisure facilities for the Youth Olympics. “The Olympic Committee said they were very exited that we thought of post-Olympic stress and especially that we proposed a modular system that can be assembled based on the user’s needs,” wrote the project group leader, Amir Nima Ahmadi, in an email from Cologne, Germany. He and his peers, Veronique Allard-Buffet, Niven Ibrahim, John Kotsampouikidis, Emma Lee and Mohammed Yawar Siddiqui, were in the country last Wednesday collecting their bronze medal for their winning design. Out of 133 submissions from 36 different countries, they are the first North American team to win the international award sponsored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and the International Association of Sports and Leisure Facilities.

The team’s design revolves around shipping containers in which different materials, like signs and foldable seating units, would be stored. When the materials have been taken out of the shipping container, the container itself can be used as infrastructure, then when the games are over everything can be packed back into the container and shipped to the next destination.

“If you were a child and you got a game or a toy, you’d find it in a box and assemble it. Like Lego. You expand it, build on top of it, take it apart. That’s the idea with our kit project. All the components needed to create the required facilities for the Youth Olympics, or whatever event it may be, would be kept in the shipping containers,” said Ibrahim.

The design freshens up the original sports complex and is easily transportable, versatile, functional and economically and environmentally friendly. “I think what’s surprising is how low-tech their design is,” said Yew-Thong Leong, the team’s collaborative exercise advisor and an associate architecture professor at Ryerson. “That’s what’s amazing about it. They bring intellectual value because they’ve thought through the problems. It requires little man-power and little energy to assemble, so that anybody can host an Olympic event; you don’t have to be an industrialized country.”

Anna Kuchmenko from Ukraine won gold. Silver was awarded to Julia Schaller and Claudia Jakel from Germany. And Julian Schafer and Yun Kyeong Hoh, also from Germany, won a bronze medal for their landscape architecture design. 

The Olympic torch travels from city to city, the athletes do too, but the sports facilities that cities spend millions of dollars designing and building stay put. Once the Games end, many of the buildings are left sitting idle. Now imagine if the sports complexes, like the torch itself, could be transported from place-to-place, too.

It’s this idea that spurred six Ryerson Master of Architecture students to come up with a design concept that reuses and temporarily adds on to pre-existing sports and leisure facilities for the Youth Olympics. “The Olympic Committee said they were very exited that we thought of post-Olympic stress and especially that we proposed a modular system that can be assembled based on the user’s needs,” wrote the project group leader, Amir Nima Ahmadi, in an email from Cologne, Germany. He and his peers, Veronique Allard-Buffet, Niven Ibrahim, John Kotsampouikidis, Emma Lee and Mohammed Yawar Siddiqui, were in the country last Wednesday collecting their bronze medal for their winning design. Out of 133 submissions from 36 different countries, they are the first North American team to win the international award sponsored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and the International Association of Sports and Leisure Facilities.

The team’s design revolves around shipping containers in which different materials, like signs and foldable seating units, would be stored. When the materials have been taken out of the shipping container, the container itself can be used as infrastructure, then when the games are over everything can be packed back into the container and shipped to the next destination.

“If you were a child and you got a game or a toy, you’d find it in a box and assemble it. Like Lego. You expand it, build on top of it, take it apart. That’s the idea with our kit project. All the components needed to create the required facilities for the Youth Olympics, or whatever event it may be, would be kept in the shipping containers,” said Ibrahim.

The design freshens up the original sports complex and is easily transportable, versatile, functional and economically and environmentally friendly. “I think what’s surprising is how low-tech their design is,” said Yew-Thong Leong, the team’s collaborative exercise advisor and an associate architecture professor at Ryerson. “That’s what’s amazing about it. They bring intellectual value because they’ve thought through the problems. It requires little man-power and little energy to assemble, so that anybody can host an Olympic event; you don’t have to be an industrialized country.”

Anna Kuchmenko from Ukraine won gold. Silver was awarded to Julia Schaller and Claudia Jakel from Germany. And Julian Schafer and Yun Kyeong Hoh, also from Germany, won a bronze medal for their landscape architecture design.