It’s a bowl of blancmange was my first reaction when the latest designs for the 2012 Olympic stadium flashed up on the screen. The utter silence all around suggested that the audience was equally bemused.

The expressive, ballooning shapes of the early design have gone, replaced by a pixilated outer wall which will look exactly the same from every viewpoint, making it even more disorienting to walk round than the Millennium Dome.

What the architect Rod Sheard refers to as the stadium’s crown has all the interest of an elevated railway track. Where, oh where, is the sinuous swooping silhouette that wowed the world in Athens and will do so again in Beijing. There the engineers created sensationally athletic and muscular shapes that perfectly express and celebrate the greatest sporting event on earth.

Here the motive force behind the whole design is fear. Fear of adventure, fear of overspend and fear of leaving behind a white elephant. At the presentation the word legacy featured far more than the word sport. The main point of the brief was to ensure that an 80,000-seat stadium for the Olympics could be reduced to a 25,000-seater for community use and the occasional elite event.

Little thought has been given to the features that bring magic to the Olympics. When, with Athens in mind, I asked how the torch would be brought into the stadium I was greeted with a bemused smile and told this was a matter for the opening ceremony. But in Athens the drama of the torch descending into the stadium was a sensation, precisely because the staircase was the main focal point of the design. Here no opportunity has been taken to create memorable entrances and ascents.

True, practical elements appear to have been properly considered. There is a roof protecting two thirds of the spectators from rain but a large enough space for the centre to be filled with sunlight all day. There is shelter from the fierce winds that bedevil the Thames Estuary ensuring that the opportunity to break records will not be lost.

But the windswept area around the stadium in Stratford, East London, at present without any hint of cover, could be bitter and the hospitality pods look no more than coloured pebbles washed up from the beach. Tree planting is urgently needed for both shade and shelter.

One feature which needs a complete rethink is the stadium lighting, shown as 14 banks of rectangular lights like those around a football pitch. Athens demonstrated how night lighting could be a dazzling and constantly changing visual display. Stratford offers no more than glare.

The core of the problem is that the Olympic Board (Lord Coe honourably excepted) seems convinced, like those who gave us the Millennium Dome, that if they say the words “world-class building” often enough we will believe it and it will happen.

Ken Livingstone proclaimed: “This will be the best stadium ever constructed anywhere on the planet.” Forgive me, Ken, but I don’t think those who have been visitors to Athens and Beijing will agree.

A great building needs a great client and this project is urgently in need of someone who demands architecture and engineering with flair and character, and who is not dazzled by every latest computer image. The pixilated walls, it was pointed out, could show the patterns of the flags of every competing nation and shadowy images of famous photographs of great athletes in the past. Big deal. Or the stadium could be covered in fabric, which could be cut up and sold as bags after the Games. Don’t most people make their souvenirs before the event?

A flat-topped coloured glass bowl, surrounded by a web of steel knitting needles just will not do. The basics are there but the engineers, Buro Happold, who are among the best in the world, need to be told to produce a structure that has muscle and athleticism to it and doesn’t look the same from every angle, and looks a great deal more interesting by both day and night.