The design by architects HOK Sport features a ‘stadium bowl’ holding 25,000 permanent seats, surrounded by 55,000 demountable seats that will taken away after the Games.
Lord Coe, the chairman of the London Organising Committee, said: "It's a stadium that delivers on everything we said we would deliver on; a stadium with track and field as its primary legacy; a stadium that will be reduced from 80,000 seats in Olympic mode to a 25,000-seater community base."
An Olympic Stadium with such a large demountable element and mix of temporary and permanent seating has never been attempted before. "This is not a stadium that's going to be screaming from the rooftops that it's bigger and more spectacular," said its chief architect, Rob Sheard. "This is just a cleverer building. This is a cleverer solution."
The stadium was initially expected to cost £280 million but the costs have been revised to £496 million because of inflation and VAT.
