The Bladders

As a response to London’s classification as a city of ‘serious water stress’, a model for the extension of the city’s ailing water cistern is proposed. The Bladders are a billowing municipal water storage and treatment system unveiled as a legacy of the 2012 Olympic Park, engulfing Populous+Peter Cook’s Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre by Zaha Hadid. Giant inflated water bladders and anaerobic digester stomachs are the structural elements of an architecture that returns a segment of the Lea Valley into a ‘backyard’ for Londoners to explore. Substituting the spectacle of the Olympics for a spatially performative utilitarian architecture.