Architects Win Gold!?

According to a number of sources (mainly trusty old wikipedia, but also the book 'The Forgotten Olympic Art Competition' by Richard Stanton), there used to be an arts category to Olympic competitions up until the middle of the twentieth century. It included literature, music, painting, sculpture, town planning, and architecture! That's right, architecture used to be an Olympic event. Between 1912 and 1948, there were competitions in these artistic categories, with the possibility of winning Olympic gold, silver, and bronze. Imagine that! All of this, the vision of Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin who wanted to combine art and sport, and promote 'athletes' of mind and body. After two cancellations, the Olympics that included de Coubertin's proposal was held in Stockholm in 1912. So, for about 35 years, the competitions were reasonably successful. Eventually a report was made that criticized all the art contestants for being professionals, (and ratings may have been a factor here as well) but in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the events were derailed.

I guess they would have graded the projects for artistic and technical merit, like in figure-skating for example. Here's an Olympic Gold project in architecture by Jan Wils who designed the 1928 Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam.


Some of the other winning designs are stadiums, pools, circuses for bull-fighting, and sport parks. The closest Olympian to home is John Russell Pope who has designed a number of buildings in Washington D.C. including the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives as well as the Union Station in Richmond, VA. He won silver for the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale University:

Since the Sydney games, architecture and town planning has advanced as a major help to economic growth, and the image of a nation. Sydney truly set the bar for a modern Olympic game, entertaining the idea of reviving the art events. It revitalized one of the dirtiest brown fields in the world, introduced sustainability to mainstream architecture, and celebrated landscape architecture as a centerpiece.

What an amazing change that would be to include those same categories in Olympic sports today. The games are becoming more and more specialized now, with athletes so focused on one task for four or more years. It seems a little obsessive compulsive (though still awe-inspiring) to do triple axle sow cows for eight years straight. I wonder if athletes who could compete in more than one event, sports and arts, would be revered as another level of Olympian? By now athletes must be considered as professionals so it could be high time to introduce professional artists back in the games! Maybe that's the key to Canada's success at summer games, where our Olympians already need day jobs for lack of government funding -- might as well do art or architecture for coin! And of course, it would take steroids right out of the picture...or would it?