close your eyes and hope for the best

Montreal Olympic Stadium (click image to enlarge)

It remains, however, one of the most audacious and extraordinary building projects ever attempted… As a point of comparison, most of the blocks that the Pyramids of Giza are built from weigh just a few tons, with only some of the very largest, at 150 tons, in the same range; but they’re not suspended in mid-air!

The Olympics are coming to my city! Truthfully, I’m less excited than I was the first time that happened. There’s the commercialism, the consequent drug scandals, the acrimonious arguments about misplaced economic priorities. In Vancouver itself, protests over highway upgrades for the 2010 event have led to draconian legal measures against distinguished senior citizens, including the probable death of one elder from illness exacerbated by her jail sentence.

But in 1976 I lived in Montreal, and the noble ideals of the Games, that be-the-best-that-you-can-be philosophy were highly inspiring in my faster and stronger days.

Montreal Olympic Stadium Under Construction (click image to enlarge)

And then there was the architecture! I had been pursuing my own degree at McGill in that field while some of the most elaborate and monumental construction of modern times was going on right in town. As part of my studies, my summer project in 1975 involved documenting the progress of a much more modest structure, but as the subject was building with concrete, I could not resist adding a section about the Olympic Stadium.

I came to appreciate that the design of the latter was as impractical as it was unique, as if the mandate had been to make it as expensive as humanly possible. Among other factors, there is a cost advantage to pre-cast concrete: you build one form out of which you can cast many identical pieces. That economic principle was discarded here. Since the stadium is an ellipse, which slopes down towards one end to boot, every single one of the enormous concrete blocks that make up its structure was different from the next.

It remains, however, one of the most audacious and extraordinary building projects ever attempted. The black and white photos here were taken one year - a few dozen weeks - before the Opening Ceremonies. I hope they convey what one would have obviously feared then - there was no way this stadium could be completed in time. In just one year!?

I expected a sense of overwhelming panic when I queried an engineer involved in the project, but was instead told with absolute calm confidence that indeed it would be finished. As I came to understand, part of the reason was that the Stadium was actually not being built on the Olympic site at all, but in a municipality fifty kilometers away. The text from my student project explains it better than I could now:

The Olympic Stadium is essentially being built in Ste-Eustache, where an entire factory has been erected to supplement the contractor Schokbeton’s existing operation. The supporting structure consists of huge blocks placed together to form the cantilevered armatures of the stadium.

It was my privilege to be shown the operation in Ste-Eustache, the scale of which has to be seen to be believed. With an entire plant erected in a few months, an overhead 300-ton-capacity crane was air freighted from France and Germany after Canadian mills couldn’t promise it in time. The amount of reinforcing steel going into a single structural element appeared to be as much as that used in many entire buildings. The completed blocks weigh from 50 to 130 tons - all highway and bridge load codes are broken in trucking them to their destination. The photo shows one of about 90 tons on a flatbed truck at the Olympic site.

The casting of each structural piece is done against the preceding one to ensure an absolutely flush fit, since no grout whatsoever is used in assembly. The blocks are held in place in the structure with shear keys half the size of a man and many times heavier.

Montreal Olympic Stadium Under Construction
(click image to enlarge)

As a point of comparison, most of the blocks that the Pyramids of Giza are built from weigh just a few tons, with only some of the very largest, at 150 tons, in the same range; but they’re not suspended in mid-air! And if there was a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most construction cranes ever assembled on a single acre, I suspect the record would have been set here.

My sporadic photographic relationship with the Montreal Olympic site had in fact started a couple of years earlier with my first ever magazine assignment, which happened to be for a German publisher. Their sports magazine ran my shot of the site as it appeared then as a double-page opening spread. It showed a completely empty and basically undisturbed field in the middle of which pathetically sat a single, lonely backhoe. I never got the translation for the headline that ran across the top, but it ended with a question mark, and the implication was obvious. Perhaps it was a bit of unconscious premature schadenfreude, with the Germans aware that a debacle in Montreal might help fade the memory of the tragic ending to their own preceding Summer Games in Munich.

Despite all the justified misgivings, the Olympic Stadium was ready on time, no credit due to the French architect who designed it, great praise due to the unsung Quebec engineers and contractors who figured out how to build it and did. As I had learned in my courses, it was one thing to come up with appealing presentation drawings showing what an ambitious structure was to look like, quite another to do the head spinning calculations and produce the nitty-gritty blueprints in figuring out how to actually built the whole damn thing. It’s just my debatable opinion, but I thought that the construction of the Olympic Stadium was an excellent example of how science could be far more creative than art.

Three years after the Montreal Olympics, I found myself over the top of the Stadium in a small plane piloted by my longtime friend, Bo Curtis, as we worked on Canada From the Air. The photo that eventually went into that book is very different from the aerial here. At that time, the tower and the retractable roof that it supports had not yet been built; they were not essential for the games.

Ten years after that, in 1989, we flew over the site again. This time the Stadium was finished, the rays of the setting sun grazed the roof, and illuminated what is the world’s tallest leaning tower, in the picture here.

Those were the days. In Ottawa we had also managed shots from directly overhead of the Parliament Buildings, 24 Sussex Drive and Rideau Hall. All that was required back then was clearance from the air traffic controller on duty, casually granted if there were no other aircraft whose flight paths might intersect. Not so anymore, not after that dark day in September, 2001.

© J.A. Kraulis

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