AMID the cheers of Londoners celebrating the fact that the Olympics are coming to the capital in 2012, you could discern the unmistakable sound of champagne corks popping in every developer’s office across the capital. Olympics, put bluntly, means profit for all stakeholders in the built environment, from the owners of terraced houses in Stratford, which, in one minute, leapt in price by £30,000, right up to the massive property developers who’ve already bought up tracts of land in the Lea Valley. They stand to make a packet not just by building the Olympic venues, but because the Olympics guarantees the success all of London’s other mega-projects — White City, Elephant and Castle, King’s Cross, the Thames Gateway. Get out the Krug.

There are caveats, of course, chiefly whether Britain, hardly renowned for the successful, on-time, on-budget completion of major building projects, can get itself into gear. I’m more worried about what will happen if it does.

Architecture doesn’t win the Olympics, but it sure helps, not just by providing the physical spaces, but, almost more important than the sport these days, iconography too. London won, in part, because it carried the now-hackneyed, futuristic one-world Olympic message clearest and best, largely through the artists’ impressions of London 2012. These were from an architectural dream team of EDAW, saviour of post-bomb Manchester, HOK, faceless, but gets things done, Allies & Morrison, and, there to add the magic, Foreign Office Architects. Indeed the look of the Olympic Park, with its sexy, half-building, half-landscape futurist flowing lines, was all FOA, who promised an Olympics “grown from the bottom up”. Instead of plastering the site with bland internationalism it captures “the gruff, East London street culture of 100 languages” that makes the city the centre of the world.

Rumours have been circulating that FOA’s edgier design could be marginalised as Britain’s usual risk-averse building culture kicks in through the fear of being late and over-budget. This would be terrible. Barcelona, as always, should be the model: its 1992 Olympics were part of a 20-year regeneration employing the most innovative architects and planners. FOA are among the most innovative practices in the world. They’re based in London. Use them.

Stratford is already gearing up for megadevelopments in steel and glass. The last thing we want is for its identity to be washed away in the bland internationalism that has dogged the last two games.