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September 26, 2003—Daily News
Bid to design village of Olympic proportions
New York group bidding for 2012 Olympics wants names of designers
interested in creating housing on southwest tip of Long Island City.
A decision on New York City's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games is still more than a year away, but when it comes to a certain neighborhood in Queens, the competition has already begun. Architectural think tanks have been invited to enter an international design competition to help create an Olympic Village at Queens West on the East River waterfront should the city be chosen as the site of the 2012 Games.
A request for qualifications was issued yesterday by the NYC2012 Committee, calling on designers to help conceive housing for 16,000 coaches, athletes and officials who would call Queens home for 17 days during the competition.
Plans call for townhouses, mid-rise structures and high-rise buildings to be built on 36 acres on the southwestern tip of Long Island City.
After the games, Olympic Village in Long Island City would become rentals and condominiums for 18,000 mid-income New Yorkers.
"It's another important milestone in the long race that New York has been in to bring the Olympics 2012 to New York City," said Daniel Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding and founder of NYC2012. "We feel that it is important that we hold ourselves to a unique standard in the design for the Olympic Village."
Interested architects must enter a nine-page submission of their qualifications - not designs. Entries will be reviewed by a 10-member international panel that will include two Olympians who lived in the villages during the games in Atlanta and Sydney.
A question and answer period ends Oct. 24. The deadline for submissions is Nov. 17. After its review, the international panel will select five finalists. That decision will be announced Dec. 4.
The winner of the design competition will be announced in May 2004 and awarded $100,000. The four remaining finalists each will receive an honorarium of $50,000. The international design competition is privately funded.
An exhibition of the final designs for Olympic Village will include a public comment period for six to eight weeks, like that for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. The final design decision will be a consensus among the public, city, state and NYC2012.
Doctoroff said NYC2012 would then sell Olympic Village to the International Olympic Committee.
Paris, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and London are among the cities also in the running for the 2012 games. If New York is selected by the IOC in July 2005, construction on Olympic Village - at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion - would begin shortly thereafter.
http://www.nyc2012.com
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