A radical architect whose designs have only been realised five times in his 46-year career has been announced as the head of design for London’s Olympic stadium.

Peter Cook — who is best known for his conceptual designs in the 1960s, including a portable metropolis suspended from an airship — is leading the stadium project for HOK Sport, the only architects being considered for the job.

Professor Cook told Building Design magazine that he will deliver a “really chirpy” building unlike any existing stadium.

Its main innovative feature will be its ability to contract from an 80,000-seat venue to a 25,000-seater. Senior architects working on the project compared the building to a Lego toy, which can be dismantled and reassembled in a different way.

Professor Cook told The Times that the components removed from the stadium after the Games will be useful buildings in their own right. “It will be community-orientated,” he said. “People will enjoy the components. They will be put to use in the area, for example in schools.”

His appointment is a bold decision because he is chiefly a conceptual architect. His most recent project was the bulbous Kunsthaus, a museum of modern art, in Graz, Austria.

He is more closely associated with the imaginative designs created by Archigram, the group he founded in 1961. Its proposals included Blow-out Village, a temporary city mounted on a hovercraft. He was personally responsible for Plug-in City, a metropolis that had no buildings, only a superstructure into which pods could be inserted.

The announcement of Professor Cook’s involvement prompted a mixed reaction from architecture experts and others involved in the Olympic project.

Bob Blackman, the London Assembly Conservative spokesman on the Olympics, hoped that Professor Cook’s designs would not be too otherworldly. “This reminds me of the civil servant in Yes Minister telling his boss, ‘That is a very courageous decision, minister’.

“But on a serious point, we are on a tight timescale and we cannot afford to have a false start. You can have all the conceptual designs you like but what we need is something that is practical and works.”

Marcus Binney, architecture correspondent of The Times, said that Professor Cook’s designs often looked impossible to build. “He’s one of the great avant-garde and visionary architects who until recently had never had a building completed,” he said.

“His designs were so extraordinary — very wacky and almost futuristic visions — that they were impractical to build 20 or 30 years ago. Modern technology has effectively caught up with his designs, so that now they can be built at a reasonable price.” Piers Gough, an architect with CZWG, said that Professor Cook’s most recent building in Austria was a triumph.

“He has had a huge influence from the time of his teaching. His influence is all over the high-tech architects we have now like Foster and Rogers.

“But he [Professor Cook] is more whimsical than them, which I think is a really interesting idea for the Olympics, that it is not just all serious muscle. There will be some poetry too.”

HOK Sport — which has not been formally appointed but is the only company in the running — has four weeks to submit its plans. A senior source said that Professor Cook had inspired a flurry of ideas, but most had to be abandoned. “He thinks completely differently to anyone else. Ninety per cent of our ideas end up on pieces of paper that are thrown in the corner of the room, but the surviving ideas are amazing.”

Professor Cook’s involvement comes after criticism of the Olympic Delivery Authority last month, when Lord Rogers of Riverside suggested that it was giving too little emphasis to design. Lord Rogers said that he would boycott all Olympic projects unless the authority reversed its policy of appointing contractors before designers had become involved.

Cook report

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Fern Britton: 'I still can't see that I was wrong'
• Extreme cooking
• Easy French: Tarte Tatin