Project Director for London 2012 Olympic Park to Lecture March 5

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London 2012 Olympic Park. (Image courtesy of John Hopkins)

John Hopkins will present the lecture “Towards Sustainable Development: The Making of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park” at 1:30 p.m. Monday, March 5, at Giffels Auditorium in Old Main, on the University of Arkansas campus.

Hopkins was the project director for the parklands and public realm, at the Olympic Delivery Authority from 2007-11, for the London 2012 Olympic Park. Prior to that, he was a partner in LDA Design, heading up their London office. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

He will discuss how they designed and delivered a sustainable infrastructure, not only for the Olympic Games, but also for a community of up to 10,000 homes in legacy. Sustainability was integral to the bid for the 2012 Games. Among the many aspects considered, the Olympic Delivery Authority committed to use venues already existing in the UK where possible; only make permanent structures that will have a long-term use after the Olympic Games; and build temporary structures for everything else.

Hopkins has a diploma in Landscape Architecture from Thames Polytechnic and a Master of Landscape Architecture, with distinction, from Louisiana State University.

Hopkins is a landscape architect, urban designer and environmental planner with expertise in regional planning through to site design and implementation. In addition to the United Kingdom, he has practiced in Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong and the United States.

He is a corporate member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a Fellow of the Landscape Institute, and a Churchill Fellow. He wrote Urban Space: Form, Funding and Function, based on research done in Boston, New York, Minneapolis, and Portland, Ore. He also co-edited and contributed two chapters, one co-written with Peter Neal, to The Cultured Landscape – Designing the Environment in the Twenty-first Century published by Spon Press. He was a featured practitioner in Ian Thompson’s Ecology, Community and Delight.

Hopkins has won several awards, including the Landscape Institute’s Peter Youngman Award for Outstanding Contribution to Landscape, and from the Royal Town Planning Institute, Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects and the Civic Trust. He is a visiting professor at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Greenwich, and currently co-writing The Making of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with Peter Neal to be published by Wiley in 2012, and is researching and writing The Global Garden – Ecological Economics and Infrastructure in his own right.

This lecture is presented by the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

Admission is free, with limited seating. For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.