The architect behind the Rio 2016 Olympic Park masterplan has revealed how a focus on sustainable design and temporary venues has created a lasting legacy for the Brazilian city.

Bill Hanway, executive vice president at AECOM, has worked with the international practice to masterplan Olympic parks for both the Rio Games and the London Olympics four years earlier.

In an exclusive interview, he told sports Management how this time round there has been an enhanced focus on ensuring the facilities have a life after the world’s athletes have headed home.

“One of the key issues we carried on from London was that we didn’t want to be in a position where we had arenas and venues which were abandoned after the Games – or had a capacity which was in excess of what was required,” he said. “We didn’t want a repeat of some of the problems faced by previous Games.

“In London, it meant that we had a number of temporary venues. The Rio mayor wanted us to take that concept of temporary one step further. So instead of just thinking about venues which could be demounted, moved to an alternative location and rebuilt in that same form, he wanted to see whether we could design these temporary venues in modular parts – in order to take them apart and then reuse them in an entirely different way.”

This strategy has been one of the most successful architectural innovations of the Games in Rio. Notable examples are the Future Arena for handball – designed by Oficina de Arquitetos and local practice Lopes, Santos & Ferreira Gomes – which will be dismantled after the event. Material from the building will be used to build four state schools.

In a similar vein, the Olympics Aquatic Stadium will be disassembled after the Olympics and rebuilt as two public pools elsewhere in the city. Meanwhile six venues from the Olympic Park will be utilised as a new Olympic Training Centre.

Hanway described himself as “particularly proud” of how effectively architects have adopted an approach to temporary architecture. He said the question of how to create a lasting legacy for the facilities has occupied AECOM for over a decade.

“We won the international competition for Rio in in the middle of 2005 when we were still heavily involved in the London planning,” he said. “We had confidence in our methodology and approach for London, which we thought was relevant as a starting point for the conversation at Rio.

“When we were working on the London plans, we were always drawing a transition masterplan and a legacy masterplan at the same time to ensure all of our work [between the two Games] overlapped.

“We used that same approach when it came to starting the conversations about the Rio bid, so legacy was very much part of our early planning process.”

The full interview with Bill Hanway, and an outline of all the facilities being used at the Rio Olympics can be read in the latest issue of Sports Management.