In July 2028, Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympic Games. There will be years of prep before then: architectural plans, new construction, and infrastructure to accommodate the tens of thousands of arriving athletes, not to mention the millions of spectators trickling in from around the world.

But when the Olympics are over and everyone goes home, those new buildings—sports venues, athlete dorms, restrooms, souvenir shops, restaurants, and concession stands—will sit empty. Looming over the Olympics’ afterlife is the substantial and somewhat tricky question of what the event’s planning team will do with them.

“Those buildings don’t get used after the four weeks of the Olympics and Paraolympics,” says California-based architect Rob Berry. “They become obsolete. We are thinking about how buildings are made and really looking at it.”

Berry is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and principal at Los Angeles-based firm Berry and Linné. He says the setup presents an incredible opportunity to explore some very big questions about the stream of construction waste generated every year. To make that point, the students in his second-year undergraduate studio are hard at work on a project he’s calling Making LA. It focuses on designing structures for the LA 2028 Olympics that can transform, disappear, or begin a second life after the spectacle is over.

A few of the ideas the USC students have dreamed up include a concession stand that can be disassembled and recycled or reused after the games for a different purpose and a media center that can be transformed into a public library. The project is part theory, part design exercise, as Berry hasn’t been in touch with the LA28 planning committee … yet.

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