ZMT: Daily Fact: Architecture used to be an Olympic event

Daily Fact: Architecture used to be an Olympic event

Original photo by Chris Harris/ Alamy Stock Photo

Can you picture an Olympic hopeful waking up at the crack of dawn to spend hours hunched over a drafting table, perfecting their blueprints? Thanks to International Olympic Committee co-founder Pierre de Coubertin, the concept became a reality when the IOC began awarding medals in the categories of sports-related architecture, music, literature, painting, and sculpture at the 1912 Stockholm Games.

The first gold medal in architecture went to the Swiss team of Eugène-Edouard Monod and Alphonse Laverriére for their "Building Plan of a Modern Stadium." By 1928, the architecture competition had been divided into the subcategories of town planning and design, with the Netherlands' Jan Wils winning gold in the latter for his still-standing Olympic Stadium Amsterdam. However, the subjective process of selecting artistic champions ultimately produced some questionable results. Sometimes, finicky judges refused to award gold (or silver, or bronze) medals when the quality of submissions failed to meet their lofty standards. Other times, such as during the 1936 Berlin Games, the host country's creative teams tallied a suspiciously disproportionate share of winning hardware.

Artistic competitions remained part of the Olympics following a hiatus for World War II, with Austria's Adolf Hoch and Finland's Yrjö Lindegren claiming architecture gold in 1948. However, the writing was on the wall for these Jim Thorpes of the compass and T-square, as new IOC President Avery Brundage (who started in 1952) strongly discouraged the proliferation of professionals in the amateur realm. The creative arts were permanently relegated to the sideshow of Olympic exhibitions in 1952, and the hard-earned efforts of champion builders, singers, and writers from the first half of the 20th century were banished to obscurity when their medals were stricken from the Olympic record books.

Numbers Don't Lie

Number of fine arts Olympic medals awarded from 1912 to 1952

151

Number of people to win both athletics and arts Olympic medals (Walter Winans and Alfred Hajos)

Cost, in billions of U.S. dollars, to build Tokyo's Olympic Stadium for the 2020 Games

1.43

Number of licensed architects in the U.S. by the end of 2020

121,997

The 1900 Olympics represented the high-water mark for bizarre Olympic events.

While obscure sports have come and gone from the Olympics over the years, the 1900 Paris Games stick out for the sheer number of off-the-wall competitions. This can at least partly be explained by the fact that the Olympics coincided with the spectacle of the 1900 Paris Exposition, resulting in events that ranged from weird (horse long jumping) to cruel (live pigeon shooting) to pointless (underwater swimming). Yet these Olympics were also memorable for some of the more inspired moments of innovation, which included multinational teams competing in tennis, polo, football, rowing, and tug-of-war. It also marked the first year that women were allowed to compete in the Games, an accomplishment barely dimmed by the meager presence of the lone fan who showed up to watch the ladies square off in croquet.

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Daily Fact: Architecture used to be an Olympic event