The celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki has best defined vernacular architectures challenge of speaking to both the traditional past and the industrial future. He calls it an effort to link together the historical character of ones culture with the development of a built urban landscape that cannot literally re‑create its own history. Makis own forays into sports architecture in Tokyo and around Japan are examples of this his massive, helmeted arenas have celebrated lightness where others would have insisted on weight.

  The search for a vernacular has led many Australian designers to corrugated iron an easy way to acknowledge a rural past while keeping construction costs low. At Homebush, Makis challenge has been solved by another quick raid on the familiar. It only takes a few glimpses of the curved, scaffolding‑like rooflines of Stadium Australia and the Olympic Park Railway Station to see that the character reference in this project is the curve of Australias beloved coat hanger, the Sydney Har‑bour Bridge. It is a clever reference even while it is an obvious one, and one willingly made by many of the architects called to work on the $1.4 billion worth of projects that make up the Homebush Bay site. But ultimately the architectural quotation of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is ruined by the commonplace, for mass urban building in Australia has adopted a dumbed-down version of I.M. Peis space frame, which can now be seen clinging to shopping malls, train stations, and football fields in suburbs around the country.

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The games of the modern Olympiad are an international television sports event for which the host city is expected to provide the studio audience. For the 2000 Sydney Summer Games, the Australian organizers have built an all‑purpose, self‑sufficient sound stage of massive, Truman Show proportions.

  The main events of the Olympics will be held within the 1,878‑acre Homebush Bay complex, home to new stadiums, public spaces, and the Olympic Village. The just‑completed buildings of this vast settlement offer insight into what some local architects now define as a contemporary vernacular for that quintessential Australian building, the sporting arena. Strangely, and most unfortunately, that vernacular is based on a perky architectural detail that has become a cancer on many public buildings and civic spaces in this country: white-painted scaffolding made of structural steel.

  The Homebush Complex, a reclaimed industrial site on the upper reaches of the Parramatta River, 10 miles inland from Sydney Harbour, is every bit as eerie and impressive as Jim Carreys virtual hometown. The area started out as a flat river estuary and was degraded over many years by its use as a slaughterhouse, armament depot, and dumping ground for household and industrial waste. This created a usefully bleak aesthetic of its own: The massive brick pit in the now demolished State Brickworks at Homebush was the location for the shooting of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. What rises now from this revegetated, post industrial plain is Australias Olympian vision: a sleek and optimistic sports theme park constructed of lightweight steel, recycled timbers, polycarbonate sheeting, and girders. Every avenue and outlook is potentially an uncluttered television sight line.

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