Beijing Olympic Stadium (the "Bird's Nest") - by Herzog & de Meuron

[Kris]

This is one of three entries selected from the thirteen initial ones. Hopefully it will be the winner. From a collaboration between Herzog & de Meuron and China Architecture Design Institute.


http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/301.jpg

Architectural Summary

The new National Stadium is located on a gentle rise in the centre of the Olympic complex. It is conceived as a large collective vessel. An undulating composition of high and low elevations moderates the bulk of the vessel and gives it a dramatic sweeping form. The stadium's appearance is pure structure. Facade and structure are identical. The structural elements mutually support each other and converge into a grid-like formation – almost like a bird's nest with its interwoven twigs. The spatial effect of the stadium is novel and radical and yet simple and of an almost archaic immediacy, thus creating a unique historical landmark for the Olympics 2008.

The stadium is conceived as a large collective vessel which makes a distinctive and unmistakable impression both when it is seen from a distance and from close up. It meets all the functional and technical requirements of an Olympic National Stadium, but without communicating the insistent sameness of technocratic architecture dominated by large spans and digital screens. The spatial effect of the stadium is novel and radical and yet simple and of an almost archaic immediacy. Its appearance is pure structure. Facade and structure are identical. The structural elements mutually support each other and converge into a grid-like formation, in which facades, stairs and the roof are integrated.

Visitors walk through this formation and enter the spacious ambulatory that runs full circle around the stands. From there one can survey the circulation of the entire area including the stairs that access the three tiers of the stands. Functioning like an arcade or a concourse, the lobby is a covered urban space with restaurants and stores that invite visitors to stroll around.

The stands are designed without any interruption to evoke the image of a bowl. This evenly constructed shape serves to focus attention on the spectators and the events on the field. The human crowd forms the architecture. The facility provides good comfort, excellent views and a superb atmosphere. It will generate crowd excitement and drive athletes to outstanding performances.

The Exterior Shell – Inflated Cushions as a Filler

Just as birds stuff the spaces between the woven twigs of their nests with a soft filler, the spaces in the structure of the stadium will be filled with inflated ETFE cushions. On the roof, the cushions will be mounted on the outside of the structure to make the roof completely weatherproof. Whilst the rain is collected for rainwater recuperation the sunlight filters through the translucent roof providing the lawn with essential UV-Radiation. On the facade, the inflated cushions will be mounted on the inside of the structure where necessary, e.g. to provide wind protection. Since all of the facilities – restaurants, suites, shops and restrooms – are all self-contained units, it is possible to do largely without a solid, enclosed facade. This allows natural ventilation of the stadium which is the most important aspect of the stadium's sustainable design.

The Sliding Roof – the Lid of the Tin

The sliding roof is an integral part of the structure of the stadium. When it is closed, it converts the stadium into a covered arena. Just as a tin is only complete with a lid, the roof, whether closed or open, is an elementary part of the whole. With its own structural logic, it is also a grid-like formation that forms a waterproof shell together with the inflated cushions.

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/302.jpg

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/303.jpg

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/304.jpg

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/305.jpg

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/b11/xiaoguo/306.jpg

Descriptions and renderings of all the entries: http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/indexeng.asp

[Kris]

Allianz Arena, Munich (under construction):

http://www.sportsvenue-technology.com/projects/allianz/images/munich01.jpg

http://www.abbs.com.cn/bbs/attach/2003/03/28/1287926-hdemstadium06a-embed.jpg

The walls of the 66,000-capacity structure, designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, will comprise inflatable plastic cushions. Through a series of lighting elements the colours of the cushions will change depending on what team is playing at home. White/blue or red/white diamonds will move over the walls as if it is a giant LED screen.

[jack]

now why can't they propose something like that for the Jets and New York Olympics?

[NoyokA]

That would not work in New York, thats why.

The sea-coral. And the air bag, powder donut, pin-cushion, whatever. Inspired it is.

(Edited by Stern at 3:18 pm on April 1, 2003)

[Gulcrapek]

It makes me hungry.

[Kris]

Too marvelous and extraordinary to even be considered in NY, where such wonders are of the past - unless a major landmark is destroyed and has to be replaced. People would reject the "alien invasion" immediately. Unusual architectural beauty not long ago integrated by habit has been banished.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Maybe this Chinese Stadium wouldn't work in New York, but it does make me wish that the proposed Jets Stadium had a more inspiring design than what we've seen.

[Fabb]

Too marvelous and extraordinary to even be considered in NY, where such wonders are of the past - unless a major landmark is destroyed and has to be replaced. People would reject the "alien invasion" immediately. Unusual architectural beauty that was not integrated by habit long ago has been banished.


Even though you can always find somebody who rejects any kind of change in the cityscape, I'm sure that in general, people in NY would welcome an unusual architectural beauty.

The problem is, nobody would be willing to fund it.

[dbhstockton]

Yeah, the problem has been the shameful lack of imagination on the part of developers. *The market is there for more daring architecture, but the developers don't have the vision or the guts to provide it. *

[ddny]

The Beijing Stadium is great.

The proposed Jets stadium needs alot more work (imagination). I guess I was expecting alot more than a square structure...

[Kris]

Swiss architects scoop Olympic gold

The design by the Basel-based duo, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, was chosen by an international jury and by visitors to an exhibition of projects for the stadium.

Out of 6,000 visitors, 3,506 voted for the Swiss design, which was up against stiff competition from Chinese and Japanese architects.

“We knew that our design was extraordinary, but it’s always a lottery,” Harry Gugger, the partner in charge of the stadium project, told swissinfo.

“For an architect, winning [this competition] is like [qualifying] for the Olympic Games – it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

Bird’s nest

The design is inspired by the interwoven twigs of a bird’s nest and consists of transparent, plastic shells, through which the stadium lights will shine.

The Swiss architects will work together with Chinese experts to build the arena, which will seat 100,000 spectators.

“I think we sort of reinvented stadium architecture,” said Gugger. “You can’t change the basic form of a stadium… but you can add a new architectural quality.”

Herzog and de Meuron have already won a string of important contracts for major venues, notably St Jakob’s Park stadium, home of Swiss football team, FC Basel.

Chinese contracts

Herzog and de Meuron’s win comes months after another Basel-based practice, Burckhardt + Partner, won a contract for a large sports complex for the 2008 Olympics.

And the Ticino-based architect, Mario Botta, recently designed the Museum of Modern Art in Beijing.

Gugger said the clutch of contracts scooped by Swiss architects in China was a sign of Switzerland’s prominence in the field of international architecture.

“There’s a huge market in China, which is now open to international architects,” explained Gugger. “Swiss architecture ranks high internationally and it’s only natural that they are getting their share.”

swissinfo, Vanessa Mock and Joanne Shields

[Fabb]

Bravo.
Vive la Suisse !

[Kris]

Et à bas la France! Je plaisante.

[Fabb]

Why ?
The French designed the opera house in Beijing. Or Shanghai. Or both, I don't remember.

[Kris]

Shanghai. I don't think much of it.

http://www.imaginechina.com/ic/imgs/2003/0326/p005399_21.jpg
Sections

[Fabb]

It looks like a stadium.

[Kris]

http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/weiwei.html

[Kris]

AUG 5, 2004

China suspends work on Olympics 'bird nest'

Fancy stadium to be redesigned to lower costs as part of central government's drive to curb 'white elephant' projects

BEIJING - Work on China's 3.5 billion yuan (S$730 million) national stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games has been suspended, amid calls for a redesign and cost cuts.

The 100,000-seat stadium's 'bird-cage' design would have to be axed, a spokesman for the Games organisers said, as local governments across China scramble to curb extravagance and halt 'white elephant' projects under an ongoing central government drive to prevent the economy from overheating.

Plans to build a towering 5 billion yuan headquarters for broadcaster China Central Television were shelved recently. The 230m high structure would have been the tallest building in Beijing.

Sources said the plan drew the ire of Premier Wen Jiabao, who has tried to rein in investments in real estate, cement, auto production and steel projects to avert economic fallout.

The newly completed National Theatre has also come under fire. Critics said the futuristic look of the building, designed by French architect Paul Andreu, does not fit well with its historical surroundings. The bubble-shaped opera house, built at a cost of US$325 million (S$560 million), was said to be too expensive and difficult to clean.

Builders broke ground last December for the Swiss-designed Olympic stadium, whose latticework of girders is a prominent image of China's Games preparations.

Dubbed the 'Bird Nest' by the Chinese press, the original plan called for up 160,000 tonnes of steel - four times the average for a conventional building, said Mr Peng Peigeng, an architecture professor at Tsinghua University.

Ms Zhu Jing, of the 2008 Olympics organising committee, said work has been suspended for a redesign meant to lower the cost. She said she did not know how long the suspension would last, the new projected cost or other details.

The suspension follows a demand by Beijing Mayor Wang Qishan last month for organisers to be more thrifty.

There have also been reports of concerns over the stadium's safety.

According to Hong Kong's pro-Beijing daily Wen Wei Po, the suspension arose from a report submitted by 10 senior academics with links to the construction sector.

The paper said the group told Premier Wen that the stadium's design focused too much on aesthetics and ignored basic principles such as safety, practicality and environmental protection.

The alarming amount of steel, with no guarantee of stability and safety, was a waste of resources, it concluded.

The central government reportedly heeded the views and set the rule that organisers should not 'have their eyes only on things big and foreign'.

The government regards the Olympics as a matter of national prestige and has said it plans to spend US$24.2 billion on new subway lines and other improvements in Beijing. -- AP, Reuters

Copyright @ 2004 Singapore Press Holdings

[Kris]

Olympics stadium redesign may save $336m

2004-08-23 10:33:37

BEIJING, Aug. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- China could expect savings of up to 1.6 billion yuan (S$336 million) with the redesign of the Beijing Olympics stadium for the 2008 Games, reported foreign agencies, citing China Newsweek as the source.

Work on the project was suspended earlier this month amid a nationwide drive to cut down on "white elephant" projects under ongoing central government efforts to prevent the economy from overheating.

The stadium's new design, which has been endorsed by experts, is expected to slash the construction bill from the original 3.89 billion yuan to 2.3 billion yuan, the China Newsweek reported.

Experts, however, believe costs for the Swiss-designed stadium could be scaled down further.

The original design of the stadium was to feature a latticework of girders which called for up to 136,000 tonnes of steel - four times the average for a conventional building.

A task force for the redesign plans to reduce the amount of steel needed to just 32,000 tonnes, mainly by scrapping the retractable roof and enlarging the size of the rooftop opening.

A report by China Times yesterday said the project's original design featured a retractable roof at the centre of the stadium's rooftop to shelter athletes and spectators.

Under the new design plan, only the spectator stand would be covered.

The deputy chief architect of the China Architecture Design and Research Group, Mr Li Xinggang, explained that the rooftop opening was designed to be small to facilitate the opening and closing of the retractable roof.

He stressed that the aesthetics of the stadium would not be affected by the redesign. Enditem

(Agencies/China Newsweek)

www.chinaview.cn

[Dominican NYC the 2nd]

:( No cool stadium...

[Kris]

October 28, 2004

AT HOME WITH

An Exile Ascends China's Big Stage

By CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/28/fashion/28stad1.xl.jpg
REHABILITATED Ai Weiwei helped design the Olympics stadium for China.

BEIJING

THANKS to his work with the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron on the Olympic stadium being built here for the 2008 Summer Games, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei suddenly finds himself with a rising profile in the architecture world.

It's a funny coincidence given the nature of the project, Mr. Ai, 47, said on a rainy afternoon recently, breaking out of his usually stoic mien to laugh at himself. "I'm just not a very sporty man," he said.

He was sitting under a big umbrella in the courtyard of his house and studio complex, a collection of spare, Bauhaus-style light-brick buildings he designed himself and finished about five years ago.

"I don't think I've ever been inside a stadium before," he added.

In fact, his role is even more unlikely than that. While Mr. Ai has helped design a piece of Olympic architecture that seems destined to become a landmark of the new China in the eyes of the world, he is also a former enemy of the state. Or at least the son of one.

Mr. Ai's father, Ai Qing, was perhaps the best-known poet of his generation, and among the most acclaimed Chinese literary figures of the 20th century. But he was caught up in a purge of intellectuals that began in 1957. In 1958, when Ai Weiwei was a year old, the government sent the family away from Beijing, beginning a forced exile from the capital that would last nearly 20 years.

The family was first deposited in a newly built village in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China. As the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, when Mr. Ai was 9, he, his parents and his three siblings were shipped even further north, to a quasi-military re-education camp on the edge of the Gobi Desert. There the family lived in a room dug out of the earth, with a leaky roof at ground level made of branches and mud. Ai Qing, by then nearly 60, was forbidden to read and write, and was forced to scrub toilets at the camp every day.

"We were there for five years, and my father never took a day off," Mr. Ai said.

The family was sent back to Xinjiang when Ai Weiwei was 14 and was allowed to return to Beijing five years after that. His father was exonerated in 1978.

Ai Weiwei (pronounced EYE way-way) enrolled in the Beijing Film Institute, where his classmates included Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who would go on to become two of the best-known filmmakers in China. At the same time he began making art and trying to get it shown, and he fell in with the Stars Group, made up of artists and writers, which the government tried to suppress in the late 1970's. "We became dissident artists without even trying," he said.

By 1980 he was thinking about leaving. His girlfriend at the time had relatives in the United States, and they helped Mr. Ai fly to New York in 1981, where he studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League before settling in the East Village to try to make a living as a conceptual artist.

The biggest change, he said, was that he was alone and completely without restrictions in New York, quite a shift for someone who had grown up as he had.

"It was almost like gravity disappeared, as if I was just floating, that's how much I enjoyed New York," he said.

When his father fell ill with heart problems in 1993, after Mr. Ai had been in New York more than 10 years, he faced a decision. "My relatives all told me just to come back and visit him, but I knew that it was either go back to China for good or stay in New York for good," he said. He moved back. His father died three years later, at 86.

It is a measure of how much China has changed that in the years that followed, Mr. Ai was able to restore the family name to a measure of prominence while still producing sharply political artwork.

But it is not hard to find signs of the same attitudes that sent his family away from Beijing for so many years.

While visiting Shanghai on Oct. 27 Mr. Ai was taken into custody after stopping to take a few photographs of a confrontation between police and protesters in front of City Hall. He was led to the basement of a nearby police station, where the police questioned him pointedly and erased the images in his digital camera.

"This is still a society that tries to protect itself from exposure to the truth," Mr. Ai, his normally even voice shaking with emotion, said on the phone just after his release.

The Olympic stadium, known officially as the National Stadium, itself has become a lightning rod for criticism by Chinese architects and academics who are unhappy with the role that foreign firms like Herzog & de Meuron are playing in shaping the new China. Those complaints have found at least a few sympathetic ears in the government.

Over the summer, the stadium's construction was postponed and its budget trimmed to about $375 million from about $425 million, according to news reports here, forcing the architects to give up on a planned retractable roof and to make other changes.

Still, the stadium seems likely to be the most successful of the many ambitious projects commissioned by Olympics officials for the Beijing Games. Behind an innovative and striking facade made up of a tangle of steel trusses, it will hold about 90,000 fans for the opening and closing ceremonies and events including soccer and track and field competitions.

Mr. Ai was introduced to Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the firm's founders, by Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China and a collector of Chinese art.

"We decided to work with Weiwei in a kind of workshop process," Mr. Herzog said in a phone interview from Basel, where the firm is based. Mr. Ai helped shape the gnarled trusses, for example, into an arrangement that would suggest organic forms, like a bird's nest or tree branches, rather than the fanciful experimentation of Western architects.

"We never would have dared introduce this chaotic structure of trusses if we hadn't been encouraged by Weiwei's reaction and feedback, and the way he helped us connect it to traditional Chinese forms," Mr. Herzog said.

Mr. Ai was still living with his extended family in central Beijing in 1999 when he found a patch of land on the outskirts of the city, about 10 miles northeast of Tiananmen Square. He arranged to lease the land for about $1,200 per year.

"I asked the owner if I could build on the land," Mr. Ai recalled. "He said, `I can't say yes, but if you don't ask, it's O.K.' In China there are lots of situations like this."

He hired some local farmers and built his house in 100 days. The total budget for the compound — more than 4,000 square feet of space that includes a double-height studio, an office for Mr. Ai's staff of 10, a dramatic living room with a mezzanine-level library overlooking it, and three bedrooms — was about $40,000, he said.

In a city that is growing with almost unbelievable speed, and where each new building seems determined to be bigger and gaudier than the one next door, the simple, elegant proportions of Mr. Ai's compound, with white interior walls and shiny concrete floors, are something of a radical gesture. Mr. Ai said his goal was to create a group of buildings that were "absolutely functional, with no style and no traces of culture."

The house is filled with a mixture of furniture that Mr. Ai designed — some of it straddling the line between functional and whimsical — and traditional Chinese pieces. Just off the dining area is a spacious studio that on a recent visit was nearly filled with an installation of large wooden columns that Mr. Ai salvaged from a 100-year-old temple destroyed in southern China. He said the installation was in part a commentary on the Chinese government's continued destruction of traditional architecture in cities like Shanghai and Beijing to make way for new office towers and residential developments.

In 2000 Mr. Ai designed a nearby headquarters for the China Art Archives and Warehouse in a style nearly identical to that of his house, with walls of rough-hewn light brick and a no-nonsense, squared-off aesthetic.

As he continues to pursue other architectural projects, including a public park design in Shanghai which will include small buildings designed by Michael Maltzan and Toshiko Mori, among others, Mr. Ai seems determined not to stray from the minimalism that has marked his first forays into the field.

"It seems to me that bad buildings give in to many temptations, and good ones are able to limit temptation," he said. "That's about all I know about architecture, and it seems enough."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/28/fashion/28stad2.jpg
Ai Weiwei at his studio and home near Beijing.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/28/fashion/28stad3.jpg
Ai Weiwei displays 100-year-old timbers in his house.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[BrooklynRider]

I think I'll reserve judgement until a photo of this thing is posted at completion.

[Geer]

Beijing Olympic stadium :
Venue: National Stadium; Location: Olympic Green;
Total land surface (10,000 sq. m.): 25.8;
Seats: 91,000;
Functions during the Games: Athletics, Football;
Post-Games use: The Stadium is to stage sports events at national and international levels, as well as cultural and entertaining activities;
Groundbreaking date: Dec. 2003;
Designer: Herzog & DeMeuron (Swiss) and China Architecture Design Institute;
Status quo: Groundwork has been finished. Following work is underway.

This is a crazy stadium design.

Some pics.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v646/cityq/Projects%20and%20developments/Proposal11x1.jpg

http://static.flickr.com/48/129244551_2cf776a223_b.jpg

[Kris]

May 21, 2006
The China Syndrome
By ARTHUR LUBOW

Slide Show: Olympic Countdown (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/05/21/magazine/20060521_BEIJING_SLIDESHOW_1.html)

A visit to the construction site of the National Stadium in Beijing is as close as you get in the 21st century to seeing what it must have been like to put up the Great Wall of China. At one point, 7,000 workers were toiling on the stadium, dispatched in six-month stints from the countryside and organized like an army into squadrons. When I visited at the end of March, their number had diminished to a couple of thousand: the concrete had already been poured for the huge bowl that will seat 91,000 spectators at the 2008 Olympic Games, and the raising and welding of the steel columns and beams — tasks that require extra training and elbow room — were well under way. Cranes more than 300 feet tall hovered above, hoisting metal pieces as heavy as 350 tons to form a lattice of interwoven steel. Knowing that the nickname "bird's nest" has clicked with the Chinese public, I could imagine the enormous cranes as Godzilla-fied birds and the dangling curves of steel as worms being lowered for the chicks. The 24 main columns are gargantuan — 1,000 tons each, far more than the weight of those in a conventional stadium and spaced in what appears to be a random pattern. "Everyone thinks this is the most remarkable piece of architecture we have ever designed," the architect Jacques Herzog told me months before in Switzerland, where he lives. "To realize that project there is amazing." It defies expectations to see this avant-garde building rising in China, and yet, Herzog had remarked, "such a structure you couldn't do anywhere else."

For architects, China is the land of dreams. The construction statistics tantalize. The Chinese consume 54.7 percent of the concrete and 36.1 percent of the steel produced in the world, according to a 2004 report in Architectural Record. Hungry architects are drawn to China by the abundance of economic opportunities. But Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed the stadium, doesn't need to drum up business. It has more work than it can handle. What attracted the firm's leaders to China is an openness to audacious projects, which they attribute to the lack of timidity and inhibition in the people there. "They are so fresh in their mind," Herzog says. "They have the most radical things in their tradition, the most amazing faience and perforated jades and scholar's rocks. Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and extravagant designs there. They don't have as much of a barrier between good taste and bad taste, between the minimal and expressive. The Beijing stadium tells me that nothing will shock them."

After Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games, the city authorities, with national encouragement, set out to display the material progress of their society. A euphoric wave of architectural commissions ensued. Most of the recent construction in Beijing is numbingly banal, yet a few projects — especially the headquarters for CCTV, the national television company, which was designed by Rem Koolhaas's firm, OMA, along with Herzog & de Meuron's National Stadium — promise to be modern monuments, a gutsy wager on the figures who are advancing the frontiers of Western architecture. "On the one hand, you have these two projects — CCTV, which could only be built in China, and the stadium — and you have on the other hand thousands of uninteresting projects, like mushrooms," says Pierre de Meuron, who runs the firm with Herzog. The Olympics have galvanized China's imperial impulse to impress the world, by whatever means necessary. "What is probably really amazing and amusing for the Western audience in terms of what is going on in China is this openness in attitude," says Yung Ho Chang, the chairman of the architecture department at M.I.T., who also practices in Beijing. "People start to speculate, 'Do they know what they are getting?' They want to showcase their economic success. In that sense they know. But do they know what Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron are trying to achieve in architecture? Probably no."

On their side, these innovative foreign architects are equally in the dark, frequently blindsided by forces they never anticipate or fully comprehend. Even the identity of the true decision maker can remain mysterious. Everywhere in the world, not only in China, the struggle to realize a design is vulnerable to forces outside the architect's reach: the budget shrinks, the program changes, the financing collapses, the building code alters, the client reneges. In an authoritarian and secretive state that is trying to spur capitalist initiative without relinquishing government control, however, these calamities occur with less warning or transparent reasoning. "It's like two walls in front of each other," Herzog says. "You have no clue what really happens, what are the dynamics really." Both the reigning government bureaucrats, who respond to social and political pressures, and the newly ascendant capitalists, who try to anticipate market conditions, make sudden and seemingly capricious decisions. Their explanations are incomplete and unconvincing.

A year ago, when I began looking into the work of Herzog & de Meuron in China, the firm had six projects there. By the time I began reporting six months later, only two were moving forward — the giant stadium in Beijing and a minuscule pavilion in the provinces. China is the land of disillusionment, not only of dreams. I told de Meuron that I'd heard his experience there had turned his hair gray. He smiled. "It's not only China," he said. But he acknowledged that many times over the last few years, he despaired that even the stadium would be constructed as designed. Herzog & de Meuron's Chinese adventure has two strands that occasionally intersect. "There is the building or project process," de Meuron says, "and parallel, this whole strategic and political process, which is as interesting or thrilling." At any moment, a project could slip through his fingers and smash or vanish without his ever knowing why.

The eye-popping physical transformation of China shimmers even more vertiginously when viewed from small, staid Switzerland, a country best known for discreet banking, precision watchmaking and a beady-eyed civic etiquette in which the candy wrapper that some miscreant (no doubt non-Swiss) has dropped on a train platform cries out as an unfathomable act of vandalism. Herzog & de Meuron, one of the most admired architecture firms in the world, is deeply Swiss. Located in Basel, where its two principals met as 7-year-old schoolboys, the practice first gained an international reputation for the exquisite ornamentation and detailing of its Modernist buildings. In architects' parlance, Herzog & de Meuron was renowned for covering facades with unusual "skins," like woven copper strips or photographically printed polycarbonate panels. The partners began exploring unconventional cladding because, in the steel, glass and concrete universe of Modernist architecture, it beckoned as new territory. Even before they captured the awareness of the general public with their first large-scale project, the Tate Modern in London, which opened in 2000, they were moving beyond simple boxlike structures with gorgeous skins to design formally expressive buildings that somehow manage to be both wildly imaginative and coolly restrained. The National Stadium, daring though it is, constitutes a logical arrival point for Herzog & de Meuron: the basket weave of steel that composes its facade is also its load-bearing structure. Its skin is made of bones.

Excited by the possibility of working in China, Herzog and de Meuron wondered where to make their initial foray. In 2002, contemplating an invitation to compete on short notice for the CCTV commission, de Meuron sought advice from his friend Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China and an early Western collector of Chinese contemporary art. Along with strategic counsel, Sigg provided an introduction to his friend Ai Weiwei, a prominent and very plugged-in Beijing artist. When Sigg called Ai to ask if the CCTV competition would be fair, Ai replied, "Never, from my experience in China, will you have a fair competition." Beset with complicated (and doomed to be unrealized) projects in Abu Dhabi and Moscow, Herzog & de Meuron declined to enter. Upon the victory of their friend and rival Koolhaas, with whom they enjoy a relationship reminiscent of Matisse's with Picasso, they regretted the decision. "Afterward they thought if they participated, they would have won," Ai remarked. He agreed to serve as their artistic collaborator in the next big Chinese trophy hunt — the National Stadium competition.

The rules of that competition laid out certain functional requirements. Beyond the obvious need to provide playing fields and spectator seating, the competition brief emphasized commercial post-Games uses and made an unusual demand for a retractable roof that could be closed in bad weather. In developing an Olympics strategy, the Beijing authorities hoped to avoid the head-splitting hangover that Athens and Sydney woke up to once the 17-day party ended — the obligation of maintaining a costly and impractical stadium. Yet the iconic value of the stadium might also be great, however hard to quantify. In the long months ahead, whenever their design was threatened, Herzog and de Meuron would suggest that if constructed to plan, the National Stadium might do for Beijing what the Eiffel Tower, itself erected for a temporary exposition, has achieved for Paris.

International juried architectural competitions are a novelty in the People's Republic of China. Indeed, only in the last quarter-century have foreign architects established a toehold there at all. Until then, all building plans came from the state-owned local design institutes, which churned out nondescript schemes according to a system that valued speed and efficiency over originality. In 1983, these design institutes lost state financing and were forced to become self-supporting. Still, they initiate most new construction. Furthermore, any private firm working in China is required by law to collaborate with a local design institute, which bears ultimate responsibility as the architect of record. (This system resembles Western practice, in which a visiting architect must cooperate with a locally licensed partner.) A few of the design institutes have the reputation for an enlightened attitude. The China Architecture Design and Research Group (CAG), which Ai recommended to Herzog & de Meuron, is one of the best.

When Ai traveled to Basel to discuss the stadium concept, he was joined by Li Xinggang, a young architect in the CAG. Upon arrival at the offices of Herzog & de Meuron, the Chinese emissaries found that the area set aside for the stadium design was postered with images of Chinese ceramics, baskets, jades and bronzes. Finding new ways to invoke an ancient tradition within a modern context is the intellectual challenge that animates the work of Herzog & de Meuron in China. There are many approaches to the problem, most of them awful. At the onset of the Beijing building boom in the late 1980's, the city's mayor preferred that skyscraper architects tip their hats to the Chinese past. All across town you can see tall buildings capped by absurdly historicist roofs in the style of the Forbidden City. "If you wanted it approved, you had to add a big roof," says Cui Kai, the chief architect of the CAG. "That's a very simple way to connect modern and traditional. Herzog & de Meuron are doing it in a much more interesting way."

To optimize view lines and place spectators closer to the action on the rectangular playing field, the architects designed a bowl that was higher on the short east-west sides than on the north and south. The shape, which reminded them of a Chinese basket or a vase, then had to be fine-tuned. "Two sides high, two sides low — it is not a good thing in China," Li Xinggang recalls telling them. "People will say it is like a baby toilet. This is dangerous. If you give this possibility for a competition in China, it will be enough reason to cancel the scheme." He also thought the stadium's conceptual design bore a risky resemblance to a policeman's cap. Any suspicion I might have had that Li was exaggerating the Chinese propensity for analogy was dispelled a few days after our conversation, when I drove by the headquarters of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Another architect had told me that the sleek building, designed by the Western firm Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), reminded the Chinese of a snazzy tankless toilet manufactured by Kohler. Sure enough, some cheeky advertising director, playing off that likeness, had placed a billboard for the toilet directly opposite the building. Li was right. What might in Basel evoke a Shang dynasty vessel could have less lofty and pleasant associations in Beijing.

The treacherous symbolic power of buildings in China is demonstrated by the history of another KPF project, this one in Shanghai. In 1993, the Tokyo-based Mori Building Company, which is an important KPF client, announced its intention of erecting the Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong District. The architects arrived at a striking abstract form that tapers like a chisel; at the summit, they cut out a circle 150 feet in diameter to relieve wind pressure. Although not the inspiration for the scheme, Chinese mythology represents the earth with a square and the sky with a circle. It made a nice story, and in China, a succinct, evocative subtext can be as important as subbasement pilings in getting a building off the ground. Unfortunately, the Shanghai authorities were discerning an alternate narrative. For them, a giant circle on a Japanese-owned tower unequivocally evoked the rising-sun flag. "They didn't tell us exactly what the issues were, but they said there's concern in Beijing that public opinion is upset about this project and we can't approve it when people are against it," recalls Paul Katz, the KPF principal in charge. The negotiations dragged on for more than a year. "You can't just back down," Katz explains. "Part of the waiting was to see what the real message was." Eventually, they compromised on a trapezoid. "I'm happy with it," Katz says. Construction resumed last November.

In China, nicknames can be important. Of the major projects by foreign architects that won juried competitions and are under construction in Beijing, Paul Andreu's widely reviled National Grand Theater, which borders Tiananmen Square, is insultingly called "the egg." The headquarters of CCTV has been likened to a bench, a person kneeling or a doughnut, despite pains taken by the architects at OMA to emphasize the functional reasons behind its calligraphic swoop. Lord Norman Foster's airport terminal bears an unmissable resemblance to a beast revered in traditional Chinese architecture and folklore. "Norman Foster's airport building looks like a dragon, so of course it wins," says Li Hu of Steven Holl Architects. "If it looks like a snake, it's finished." (Its use of the imperial colors red and gold is just painting the lily.) Li Hu points out that the bird's-nest analogy for Herzog & de Meuron's stadium is a positive one: "In China, a bird's nest is very expensive, something you eat on special occasions." Culinary associations aside, a bird's nest is a harmonious natural object.

When conceiving the stadium, Herzog & de Meuron developed a scheme for practical, not symbolic, reasons. In any project, one or two design issues dominate. For the Tate Modern, the question had been how to take a massive industrial space with the towering Turbine Hall and make it people-friendly. For the stadium, a key issue was finding a way to incorporate the retractable roof inconspicuously. To mask the two large parallel beams that were necessary to support the heavy roof, the architects enmeshed them in crisscrossed steel. Aesthetically, they compared the interwoven steel to the crackled glaze of a Song ceramic vase or the wooden lattices in a Ming window. To explain how the structural steel would compose the visible facade, however, the competition document used the analogy of a bird's nest, in which the twigs that support the shape are right on the surface, devoid of any ornament. Where covering was needed, as in the roof area over the seats, translucent plastic membranes would be stuffed like the grass and leaves in a nest. The public loved it. The stadium looked like a bird's nest! Even though they had come up with the metaphor to describe the building's construction concept, not its visible appearance, the architects saw no need to correct the happy misunderstanding.

Li Xinggang says that when he took the model to the exhibition hall and saw the rival entries, he thought to himself, "We will win this." He was right. The stadium-design jury (which included Koolhaas and the eminent French architect Jean Nouvel) awarded first place to the Herzog & de Meuron scheme. As required, however, the jury also short-listed two others. Rather than a green light, the design victory was to be the first in a string of yellow blinkers that illuminate this cautionary tale.

The very idea of doing something architecturally new in China is itself so new that ambitious architects must surmount novel challenges. The popular mentality, however open-minded, is enmeshed by a web of shifting and inconsistent rules. "It's not that we don't have systems," says Yung Ho Chang of M.I.T. "We have incomplete systems. We have this superprogressive energy code, but a decades-old structure code. It is pretty easy for the bureaucrats to make exceptions, which they love to do. They think every case is unique, so they will break the code. Not you.It's this kind of incomplete changeable system." The Chinese language is itself poetically vague compared with English and more open to interpretation. Winning approval of a design often involves finding a receptive official. "You go to one person who says yes and then another person says no," complains Li Hu, who, with Steven Holl, is building a mixed-use complex in Beijing. "We were almost there, and the person died of a heart attack, and we had to start all over with a new person. No one wants to be responsible."

Li Hu's unconventional Beijing project — which is powered by 600 geothermal wells and features eight towers joined by sky bridges — is called Linked Hybrid in English. The Chinese name translates rather redundantly as "Modern MoMA." "We all know MoMA is the Museum of Modern Art," says Han Fengguo, the C.E.O. of the Modern Land Group, which is developing the site (with 622 apartments, a boutique hotel and a cinema) on the outside edge of the Second Ring Road, where the ancient city wall stood until Mao had it torn down. "We want to make our new buildings as art." Like many Chinese real-estate developers, Han once worked in government and is obscurely well connected. His company procured an excellent site for this project, close to an airport expressway that has sprung up overnight. In the model sales office, a color rendering of Linked Hybrid adorns the wall, part of a sequence that also features the projects of Koolhaas and Foster as well as Herzog & de Meuron, under the shared heading "Future Landmarks of Beijing." (Andreu's unpopular theater is conspicuously absent.) Recognizing the sales appeal of distinguished architecture, the Modern Group has also pumped up the reputation of Dietmar Eberle of Austria, a foreign architect it discovered before finding Steven Holl. "For the Modern Group, Eberle would be perceived as important as Steven to the buyers of the condos," Yung Ho Chang says. "They made this brief history of modern architecture from Mies and Corbu to Eberle. Later on they added Steven." Han was chain-smoking premium-brand Chunghwa cigarettes with black filter tips, as a female assistant poured green tea into disposable cups and coffee into porcelain demitasses. He personified the message he was preaching: the convergence of Chinese and Western tastes at the rarefied level of the luxurious modern lifestyle.

For the Chinese, especially the new rich, a famous architect's imprimatur graces a building with designer-label status. "There is a new luxury beyond Louis Vuitton and BMW," Han says. An even more successful developer, the architecturally savvy Pan Shiyi of SOHO China, who has solicited (but not used) designs from Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid and Toyo Ito, says: "In the past there was a debate whether you could combine avant-garde and commercial. But I think the value of the avant-garde will be recognized in the market. Like Picasso's paintings, which were once avant-garde, and now they are very valuable." Of course, the craze for theatrically expressive schemes by famous architects also exists in the West, where public institutions, particularly museums, vie for the services of a handful of stars. The difference is that Western executives recognize that commissioning an unconventional design from Koolhaas or Herzog & de Meuron will entail a greater outlay of money, time and uncertainty. "In America, if an architect is conceived to be avant-garde, you probably wouldn't ask him to do a big housing project," says Yung Ho Chang. "In China, a developer would think, Avant-garde is a different style, we will try that."

In the months following the stadium competition submission, Ai Weiwei was approached surprisingly often by developers who told him they were looking for "the best architect in the world." He would recommend Herzog & de Meuron. Even before the stadium commission was decided, he escorted the Swiss architects on a drive four hours southwest of Shanghai to Jinhua, a small (by Chinese standards) city that is the birthplace of his father, the revered poet, Ai Qing. In 2002, at the invitation of the city authorities, Ai Weiwei designed a memorial to his father on the south bank of the Yiwu River. The city was so pleased that he was invited to plan a park on a ribbon of land that runs along the river's north bank. At the same time, he was asked his opinion of a master plan that had been commissioned for a new district of the city. "You'd better not build," he told them. "Not to build is better than to build this." The city planner solicited his recommendation. "There is no company in China that can do this," he said. "The education limits their imagination." Prodded for a referral, he said, "I am working with architects who might be interested."

Herzog and de Meuron were very interested. The opportunity to design a new city — not a gated community but a bustling commercial and entertainment district intended to serve as many as 300,000 people — arises rarely in the West. The firm's master plan would transform the former rice fields into three urban precincts, which were dubbed (in the local fashion) the Mountain, the Village and the Field: respectively, a high-rise complex, an entertainment area and a warren of small shops. They were also asked to design all of the buildings. "In Europe, you couldn't do it, because it would feel like a ghetto," says Ascan Mergenthaler, the partner directing the project. "But here they will move in and take the shell we give them and make something out of it. If you don't stop them, they start building rooms on the balconies." Also in Jinhua, Herzog and de Meuron agreed to assist with the mile-and-a-half-long strip of park by the river, where Ai proposed constructing 17 pavilions of avant-garde architecture. Herzog & de Meuron helped recruit young European architects and also agreed to build a pavilion of its own.

In these early days of their China infatuation, Herzog and de Meuron signed on to three other projects through Ai Weiwei. Two were for a Beijing developer. The larger one was a for-profit, adult-education campus at the outer edge of the city; without kitschy quotations, the Herzog & de Meuron architects designed campus quads, featuring interior courtyards and gardens, that evoked the traditional hutong neighborhoods vanishing quickly from Beijing. The other Beijing project was an unusual rental office complex, TPT Tower, which combined three high-rise buildings of different sizes on a common base at the curve of an expressway intersection. In the rendering, it resembles three ruby-colored crystals rising from a red matrix. Almost every one of the 7,000 plates of glass on the faceted facades is a different shape. When Herzog and de Meuron considered a similar scheme for a symphony hall in Hamburg, the high price of manufacture mandated a much simpler version. "Construction costs in Beijing are one-tenth the amount in the West, and in New York or London, it is 14 times as much," de Meuron says. Cheap labor, at least as much as an unfettered outlook, permits the flourishing in China of avant-garde architecture, with its penchant for original engineering, unorthodox materials and surprising forms.

The last of the Chinese projects that Ai delivered to Herzog & de Meuron inspired a design that, aside from the stadium, was their most startling. In the city of Qingdao (famous for its German heritage and Tsingtao beer), one of Ai's college friends was planning to start the first branch campus of the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. As is so often true in China, the program was inchoate. The project team designed spaces for classrooms, dormitories and production facilities in long, rectangular bar-shaped buildings, which could be subdivided according to function at the last minute. Then they piled up the bars in great heaps that looked as casually arranged as tossed pick-up sticks. Where the bars overlap, multistory atriums would encourage mingling and transmit light.

By the time I arrived in China, all of these ventures, except the tiny architecture pavilion — "the smallest project in China," Ai joked blackly — were struggling or dead. They had fallen victim to the bubbling social tensions and contradictions in a state-controlled economy that is trying to fuel growth without triggering social unrest, corrupt cronyism or an unsustainable financial bubble. Another important reason for the collapsing projects was the inexperience of the nascent developer class.

The effort to build an adult-education campus had succumbed to a newly enforced national policy that prohibits private deals between village chiefs and builders — such deals had invited corruption and provoked widespread protests. Instead, land must now be auctioned publicly. TPT Tower was stalled by the developer's need to sell other properties or find investors to pay for new construction, as the central government has tightened bank financing for commercial development. Because of a change in national policy, the city of Jinhua could not bankroll its new district directly but was compelled to auction off the development rights to three private investors, each one with an opinion — indeed, many opinions, depending on the day you inquired. It didn't help matters that the idealistic municipal official who was committed to the project had been promoted, as typically happens in Chinese government after four years. His successor seemed unmotivated to push through someone else's visionary scheme, leaving its fate uncertain.

Worst of all was the situation in Qingdao, with a discordant partnership between the local developer and Ai's old friend. Short of money, the developer of the film academy questioned the unconventional scheme and resisted the design fees. Even Ai's idealistic friend was disconcerted. "He said he wanted the best architects in the world," Chen Shu Yu, an architect who works for Ai Weiwei, told me. "We have a famous story in China. There is a person who likes dragons very much, and he likes to draw the dragon. Finally, when the dragon really tries to visit him, he is scared." In June, Herzog & de Meuron canceled its connection with the Qingdao project. The firm is still owed payment for its work. With a blithe disregard for intellectual property, the developer handed over the preliminary sketches to a local design institute, naïvely believing that the same architecture can be executed more cheaply. They broke ground last winter. "They are damaged by their own craziness," Ai says. "They don't know anything about architecture."

The one Herzog & de Meuron project that has been completed in China is the small concrete pavilion in Jinhua's architecture park. It was designed with the aid of a computer, which generated a gnarled solid out of patterns similar to the openings in brick walls that had been created for Jinhua's new district. The architects liked the pavilion so much that they developed a vertical wooden version for a museum exhibition in Basel: manufactured with a robot saw under the control of a computer program, "Jinhua Structure II — Vertical" was the first Herzog & de Meuron project to be digitally made from conception to execution. For the park in Jinhua, the building technique was worlds apart. To permit the local workers to fabricate the forms for casting the concrete, the Basel office prepared section drawings, sliced every 10 centimeters on the vertical and horizontal axes, and faxed them to Jinhua. The dusky rose concrete of the finished structure has rough edges, and some of the openings are not where the drawings specified. It doesn't matter. The pavilion has a powerful and original presence. And, unlike its Basel cousin, which is sternly marked "Keep Off!" in two languages, "Jinhua Structure I" can be clambered over freely.

It is inevitable that the mortality rate, which is high even in the West for unorthodox designs, will be still greater in China. "You need to start 10 projects to finish 2," Sigg says. The firm can take some of the concepts developed in China, however, and use them elsewhere. For example, the notion of piling up bar-shaped rough containers for the film academy in Qingdao — a scheme that was inspired by an old piece of layered wood in Ai Weiwei's collection — may magically materialize in a refined glass version as an office building for a pharmaceutical company on an orthogonal block in Basel. (The plans are still awaiting the client's approval.) "I'm sure it will look very different than it would in China," says Ascan Mergenthaler, the firm partner, "but you might say it is where the start of the idea came from."

Despite the disappointments, both Herzog and de Meuron say they have no regrets about undertaking these risky projects. "I would rather have this experience than to ask too many questions and be too careful and miss the experience," de Meuron says. "Being confronted by this culture, you mix new experiences in your own work. The ambition is to discover new ways of developing architecture." Ai, however, doesn't share this Zenlike acceptance. He advises Herzog and de Meuron against accepting more Chinese commissions. "I am so disappointed," he told me. "If it was not the National Stadium, I don't think they would get anything done."

A national centerpiece governed by an inflexible due date, the stadium could not be canceled like these other projects. The continuing involvement of Herzog & de Meuron, however, was far less certain.

After the Swiss architects placed first in the design jury, the public had the opportunity to visit an exhibition of all 13 contestants and register their opinion. Thousands cast their votes. "This is a kind of show, for the attitude of transparency," says Huang Yan, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning. An architect who studied at Harvard with Koolhaas, she organized the stadium competition. The Herzog & de Meuron team rallied to the populist call, believing it emanated from the national government. Li Xinggang and his colleagues stayed all day long at the exhibition, explaining the project to visitors and handing out picture cards of their design. "It's like an election campaign," Li says. Sigg and Ai coached him until midnight before he appeared on a popular morning talk show on CCTV. "This is the people's Olympics," Li explains. "We have to win the public vote." Otherwise, the authorities would find themselves in an awkward dilemma. It's impossible to know, in the absence of outside monitors, how accurate the tally was. Whatever the case, the design by Herzog & de Meuron, in collaboration with the CAG and Arup, a Western engineering firm, won again, although by a far narrower margin than with the expert jury. In April 2003, the firm learned it was the official victor of the design competition.

Having survived a juried contest and a public vote, Herzog & de Meuron nervously watched as the city authorities called in yet another jury to select the private consortium that would contribute 42 percent of the stadium financing in return for the construction contracts and a 30-year operations lease once the Games ended. The nod went to a group led by the giant state-owned conglomerate Citic. (The term "private" in China basically means "profit-seeking business.") Citic would take a leading role in construction as well as put up financing alongside the controlling municipal authority, Beijing State-Owned Assets Management Company. Perhaps any private partner would have appeared adversarial to Herzog & de Meuron, too eager to reduce construction expenses and maximize commercial features. But as it happened, Citic had a longstanding relationship with one of the world's largest architecture firms, HOK, which had competed unsuccessfully in the stadium design competition.

It seemed to de Meuron that the HOK losers were trying to backhandedly snatch a victory, promising greater experience and lower fees. "That was the most critical moment of the whole project," he says. "The private investor said, 'We believe in HOK, they are more professional, a bigger company than Herzog & de Meuron, more experienced with sports stadiums.' " To make his case with the city authorities, who were the ultimate arbiters, de Meuron relied on Li Aiqing, the strong-willed director of Beijing State-Owned Assets. Li says de Meuron is exaggerating the threat to the design. "Pierre can be childish," he says. "He is an artist; I like him. He worried in that time if HOK takes over the design work, they would change the original idea. But HOK didn't. I could not permit it to happen. I told the top leaders it cannot happen, because of legal, political, business issues. I report to the government, and the government supports me." On the other side, he advised de Meuron to reduce the design fee, optimize construction costs and speed up the process. Calculated on a construction cost of $325 million, which is in itself about a tenth of what it would cost if it was built in the West, Herzog & de Meuron agreed on a design fee of $20 million — or 6 percent, which is much less than what the firm would negotiate in the West, to be shared with the CAG (which gets a quarter) and Arup.

"In one year I was here 14 times, during SARS and everything," de Meuron told me in Beijing in March. "It was necessary. And for the Chinese people, it was an expression of confidence and respect. They don't want to deal with phantoms or names. They want to eat with you and drink with you." It took six months of tense negotiation before the consortium in charge of the stadium reached a contractual agreement with Herzog & de Meuron. By that time, to meet encroaching waves of deadlines, the firm had already completed its schematic design. In this contest of nerves, inaction counted as a kind of action. "It was a way for me to get to know myself better," de Meuron says. "We had been working without a contract for a long time. It was a risk. Will we get the contract? If not, we won't get money. It was very dangerous. But I knew the time was a factor. The more we worked and weren't out of the project, it was working to our advantage, because there was no time left for them." In November 2003, the contract was signed.

In China, the only two tempos are largo and prestissimo, and when the speed accelerates, there can be missed notes. Now that the protracted delay was over, the client wanted to begin construction immediately. De Meuron was summoned to appear at a groundbreaking ceremony on Dec. 24. "I said, 'I can't come, it's Christmas, for my family it's like Chinese New Year,' " he recalls. "They said, 'No, it is the 24th, it's a good day in the Chinese calendar.' " He broke the news to his wife and dutifully flew to Beijing. No one was there to greet him. When he arrived at the stadium site for the ceremony, he went to pick up a shovel and join the official guests. A female security guard pushed him aside. "I said, 'I'm the architect,' but she didn't understand," he recounts. "I don't need the shovel, but I came for that. I thought it was impolite to have someone come all that way and not participate. Then it was over, and it was too late."

Over the next months, as construction proceeded on an unforgiving schedule, the danger was always that the architects and their design could be pushed aside just as abruptly. On their side, they had an internationally famous name and the threat of a P.R. debacle. But how powerful was that in the face of an Olympics juggernaut? The bulldozers began moving earth while the architects at the CAG were cranking out their preliminary drawings for approval. New drawings had to be prepared while the earlier ones were still being reviewed. "Every day, they needed drawings," Li Xinggang recalls. "It was a very difficult time for the design consortium. Liu Qi, the No. 1 party secretary of Beijing, took part in a meeting at the construction site. The construction company said they don't have enough design papers. I stood up and said we had provided the necessary drawings and every party should cooperate. Liu Qi understood."

In the spring of 2004, two momentous events occurred to slow the process. First was the consolidation of national power by President Hu Jintao. The central government, questioning whether the 2008 Olympics projects were too costly, ordered a financial review. Then on May 23, a new terminal collapsed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, with two Chinese citizens among the four dead. The terminal was designed by Paul Andreu, the architect of the National Grand Theater in Beijing. Construction on the stadium paused for six months at the end of May, while the designs of high-profile projects were studied by panels of experts to reduce costs and enhance safety.

Andreu's National Theater is generally seen as a grotesquely inappropriate building on a supremely sensitive site. It has fueled a simmering hostility on the part of the architectural establishment against outlandish foreigners capturing coveted state contracts. That resentment sputtered to the surface in a letter to Premier Wen Jiabao by senior academics, questioning the safety and sanity of all these avant-garde designs. "They couldn't do this in their own country, so they are taking advantage of the Chinese psychology that European thinking is better," Peng Pei Gen, a senior professor of architecture at Tsinghua University, told me. "They are using the Chinese as their new-weapons test field." On the stadium review panel that the city planner Huang Yan assembled, experts in engineering advised that changing the structural system of the stadium so that a few large columns and beams (supplemented by decorative steel members) bore the weight would significantly reduce the cost and difficulty of construction. Unfortunately, it would also nullify the design. Referring to the old-guard architectural opposition, Ai Weiwei says: "They never tell the truth but always try to build up this so-called nationalism against foreigners who open up society. They lost prestige when society opened up. For 50 years they never made a single object that is countable as valuable."

From his allies Li and Huang, de Meuron learned that the construction budget, originally set at $500 million and already lowered to $325 million, had to be reduced even further, to $290 million. The steel, which the designers had slimmed from an unofficial estimate of 80,000 tons to 50,000, needed to come down to 40,000. Value engineering, in which architects shave away construction costs, could no longer accomplish the task. "When they cut the budget by that much, you can only delete features," de Meuron says. There was an elephant in the room — or, more precisely, on the roof — that he dared not mention. "We never said, 'We want to delete the retractable roof,' " he explains. "That would have been quite dangerous. They might have said, 'Your brief was to bring a retractable roof.' We were very patient." He would keep coming back with alternatives, none of which sufficed. "This was a very enriching personal experience," he says — but like many such experiences, it was also exhausting and painful. "I am the sort of person who tries to find a solution," he explains. "You bring me problems, and de Meuron tries to solve them. It is too much money, or you can't do it for this building code, or the client wants concrete, not wood — I find another way. This is how it worked for me up to now. In China, it was very different. That was a challenge for me, not only as an architect but as a person. To have someone on the other side and they are experts in misleading you or trapping you. It is never one to one when they say if they like it or don't like it. They played with me."

As time was running out, he waited and waited, until finally the government requested that he remove the retractable roof. The decision saved 15,000 tons of steel. Strangely enough, the desire to mask the support structure of the retractable roof had been an initial link in the chain of thinking that eventually led to the "bird's nest" design. The roof would have been an engineering triumph, but without it, the overall form became more graceful. And beyond the money saved, which Li Aiqing estimates at $50 million, abandoning the retractable roof saved construction time, even more crucial after the six-month hiatus. Li says he worried about finishing on schedule if the roof had been kept. When I wondered in late March if de Meuron shared that concern, the architect said: "If you asked me before, I would have said it would be a problem. Now that I have been on the site this morning, when I see what they did in 11 months, I think it is amazing. They are capable of doing almost unpossible things."

Because de Meuron and Herzog are committed to hands-on involvement in their projects, they cannot decentralize their firm. All the important design is done in Basel under their direction. To propel and control the stadium project, however, an associate, Mia Hagg, established a Beijing office in the late fall of 2003. The office also facilitates the asking of a vital question that shadows every choice: How Chinese is it?

During his three-day visit to Beijing in March, de Meuron met with the firm's local architects. At this advanced stage of the process, the design of the steel structure and the concrete bowl was already determined. In the gap between the two, the architects have inserted a hotel, a shopping mall, a convention center and some areas intended to be open at all times to the general public. "What we think is the strength of this project is the space in between, the concourse, which is to be filled with life," de Meuron told me. "In Beijing, even in this harsh climate, the people use the public space — to dance, to play cards — unlike in Germany or Switzerland." Between the red-painted concrete and the silver-painted steel, he envisioned a continuous pageant.

Most of the unresolved issues pertained to the design of the stadium interior. The stadium architects had set up lighting prototypes and tile samples for de Meuron to examine. The most elaborate model was an undulating wall section, projecting several inches and covered loosely with red silk. It was under consideration for the V.I.P. reception room.

"We have many V.I.P.'s," Tobias Winkelmann, the design project manager, explained. "V.V.V.I.P.'s, about 20. About 700 V.V.I.P.'s. About 10,000 V.I.P.'s." In a finely calibrated social ranking, during the Olympics this reception area would welcome only the V.V.V.I.P.'s and V.V.I.P.'s, who were to arrive in cars through an underground entryway, while the mere V.I.P.'s, along with hoi polloi, traveled across the landscape. "Originally in our brief we had 1,500 V.I.P.'s," Winkelmann said. "China is a big country. They kept adding numbers. Now we are up to a total of about 11,000." After the Olympics, the numbers would collapse like an accordion, and this reception area would admit V.I.P.'s of all stripes.

Winkelmann flipped through a book of images, looking at V.I.P. rooms in stadiums. "This is typical, in the Nanjing stadium," he said.

De Meuron examined the picture. "But this is a meeting room," he said. "What is typical Chinese is the U-shape of the seating plan." A symmetrical and hierarchical arrangement around a focal point evokes the court of the emperors, whose spirit palpably persists, especially in Beijing.

During the discussion, de Meuron would interrupt to ask, "What do the Chinese think?" And often, the Chinese architects who worked in the Beijing office would express harsh thoughts. They were skeptical of the red silk wall, for example.

"For me, it is very strange," a Chinese architect said, once de Meuron reassured her that he wanted a frank opinion. "The design is too Western. And if we have this on the wall, it is too heavy. We don't put very complicated things on the wall."

"I think this is maybe too expressive in this depth," a Chinese man said. "In Chinese traditional design the surfaces are more neutral."

"And also the color," the woman said.

"Not the right red, or should not be red?" de Meuron asked her.

"In China, we don't make public areas red," she replied.

"But we made the whole stadium red," said Stefan Marbach, a young Basel-based partner at Herzog & de Meuron, who, when he began working on the stadium project, was not even an associate. China has been good to him.

"The outside is different from the interior," the Chinese architect said.

"If you have something red, it is jumping at you," de Meuron concurred.

Besides, in a red room there would be no way to roll out a red carpet or display a Chinese flag.

"You know, Tobias, we will do this somewhere else, outside China," de Meuron said to Winkelmann. "This will be our Chinese influence."

In this windowless hallway in a nondescript Beijing district, I felt perched on a hinge of history. By taking on the Olympics, China committed itself to demonstrating that it is a world-class power. Acknowledging that their architects were not yet up to the challenge, the Chinese had imported the best the West could offer, and now young local architects were collaborating with and learning from Western masters. By marrying Chinese tradition with a modern outlook, Herzog and de Meuron were helping to raise the bar for architecture in China. Even the unrealized projects, which have been widely published, can influence younger architects. Cui Kai of the CAG says that his protégé Li Xinggang has recently designed a building that reflects the work of Herzog & de Meuron. In a few years, as the junior Chinese architects become more sophisticated, foreign practitioners will be less needed and perhaps less welcome. This period of intense mutual enlightenment may be brief.

De Meuron asked if the V.I.P. welcome room was sufficiently constructed for him to experience its dimensions during his forthcoming site visit.

"Yes," Winkelmann said. "When you walk through the area, you get a sense of the size of the steel and the opening."

De Meuron turned reflective. "We are Swiss," he said. "Switzerland is a very small country. The first big-scale project we did was the Tate, the Turbine Hall. For us, it was a big step. Will it function? I think it functions very well. It is not oppressive. I think the same goes for this stadium, so this huge structure is not oppressive. The way we accomplished that was with the membrane and the bird's-nest idea." He favored a similar approach for the V.I.P. welcome room. "It is a large space; it should remain large, but we don't want to be oppressive," he said. "I am not sure the walls will be that important."

He cast another fond look toward the wavy red silk model. "I think this is beautiful," he said. "Maybe we will use it somewhere else."

Arthur Lubow, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the Leipzig School of painters in Germany.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Great quote:
"Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and extravagant designs there. They don't have as much of a barrier between good taste and bad taste, between the minimal and expressive. The Beijing stadium tells me that nothing will shock them." — Jacques Herzog

[MidtownGuy]

I think this is going to be a knock-out. I'm particularly interested in the play of light emanating through the negative space created by the trusses.

[ryeler]

I found a great site with all the proposals for the olympic stadium in Beijing. Some of these are just weird. I like the first one though.

http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/indexeng.asp#11

-ryeler

[ryeler]

Also if you click on the pictures they have great close ups.

[clubBR]

http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/sp/getty/97/fullj.getty-73744593aw121_7_10_15_am.jpg
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/sp/getty/8e/fullj.getty-73744593aw120_7_10_03_am.jpg
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/sp/getty/19/fullj.getty-73744593aw116_6_34_43_am.jpg
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/sp/getty/cc/fullj.getty-73744593aw085_6_28_12_am.jpg
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-beijing-phelpsvisit&prov=ap&type=lgns
China is on a roll!

[ZippyTheChimp]

April 17, 2007

No Spitting on the Road to Olympic Glory, Beijing Says

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/17/world/17manners-600.jpg
Doug Kanter for The New York Times
Ahead of the Olympics, China is trying to improve its citizens’ public manners and curb
behavior that might offend foreigners. Beijing officials are also trying to improve the
English of some ads. A better translation of the sign above might be,
“Find something new and be pleasantly surprised.”


By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING, April 16 — For all the expectations and civic pride that Beijing has attached to being the host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, the event is a source of civic anxiety, too. What if traffic is terrible? What if the weather is bad? These are worries for any host city, but Beijing also has a few more:

What if foreign visitors are forced to navigate a minefield of saliva left by local pedestrians spitting on sidewalks? What if lines at Olympic events dissolve into scrums as local residents jump to the head of pack? What if Chinese fans serenade rival teams with the guttural, unprintable “Beijing curse”?

China’s ruling Communist Party has never been very comfortable with the question, what if? While Olympic visitors will undoubtedly be greeted with ecstatic hospitality, local officials are worried about some local habits. So as Beijing is building new sports stadiums, subway lines, futuristic skyscrapers and public parks for the Games, city leaders are also trying to rebuild Beijingers.

Citywide campaigns are trying to curb public spitting, discourage public cursing and littering and also promote lining up. There is even a campaign to rectify the often hilariously bad English translations on signs and restaurant menus. Given that Chinese leaders regard the Olympics as a milestone event to showcase China to the world, they obviously do not want to be embarrassed.

“Public awareness of manners needs to be improved,” said Wang Tao, the soft-spoken, exceedingly polite civil servant who has become a local celebrity for his efforts to curb public spitting.

Last week, the city commemorated “Queuing Day,” an event held on the 11th of every month because the date symbolizes an orderly line. Volunteers wearing satin Queuing Day sashes shooed rush-hour commuters into lines at busy subway stations, while hospital administrators and a few city officials handed out long-stemmed roses to patients who stood in line to pay their bills or pick up medicines. Local news media swarmed the event.

“This is to encourage people,” said Zhang Xin, 30, an expectant mother, clutching her flower as she left Beijing Hospital after her pregnancy checkup.

Chen Chunfang, one of the hospital administrators, summed up the purpose succinctly. “The Olympics are coming, and everyone wants to show their best,” she said.

Beijing, of course, is a sophisticated city that is the cultural and political capital of China. Nor it is alone is being accused of public boorishness; some people have even accused, say, New Yorkers of occasional displays of foul language and unflattering public behavior.

Still, some Communist Party officials have publicly fretted that Beijing may not measure up. One delegate at the country’s annual political meetings in March recommended heavy fines and a public education campaign to curb spitting, cutting ahead in line, smoking and foul language.

“They are stubborn diseases that stain the image of the capital city,” Zi Huayun, the delegate, told the country’s English-language newspaper, China Daily.

In fact, Beijing had already announced that people caught spitting in public before the Olympics could face fines up to 50 yuan, or about $6.50, hardly small change in China. Mr. Wang, the anti-spitting activist, said the Olympic spirit inspired him to begin his campaign. “I felt I must do something to contribute,” he said.

He chose a very dirty task. Public spitting is a frequent practice in Beijing and even more common elsewhere in China. (The sinus-clearing, phlegmy pre-spit hawking sound is so common that one foreigner wryly dubbed it “the national anthem of China.”) Health officials, worried about communicable disease, have long tried to curb public spitting, with limited success, given that many people do not consider it unacceptable behavior.

“I spent six months trying to figure out how to stop people from spitting,” Mr. Wang said. “I first wanted to wipe their spit up myself, but just how much could I wipe? So I decided the best way was to ask the spitting person to stop.”

He chose to begin in May 2006 in Tiananmen Square, which might qualify as an official venue if spitting were an Olympic event. “The first person I came across was a thin man, not very tall,” Mr. Wang recalled. “I said, ‘Mister, please wait a second!’ But he walked away and I couldn’t keep up.”

His campaign has since gained momentum. He has attracted hundreds of volunteers for his group, known as the Green Woodpecker Project. They carry tissues, which they offer to people as an alternative to spitting on the ground, and try to convince the offender, usually male, to change his ways. Mr. Wang himself carries a small camcorder and posts spitting action shots on his Web site.

“Woodpeckers pick up worms and clean up the forest,” Mr. Wang said. “I want to clean up the city the same way.”

Beijing’s mangled English signage is not so much a bad local habit as a local institution in the eyes of resident foreigners. English translations on signs are considered fashionable and good advertising, as well as a gracious gesture to foreigners baffled by Chinese characters. But until recently, the attention paid to the accuracy of the translation was, at best, uneven. Consider that a local theme park about China’s ethnic minorities was initially promoted in English as “Racist Park.”

David Tool, an American who teaches analytical thinking at Beijing International Studies University, recalled attending a Peking Opera performance in 2001 that offered a running digital translation in English.

“They had this line that should have said ‘auspicious clouds in the sky’ but it read ‘auspicious clods,’ ” Mr. Tool recalled. He said a group of foreigners in the audience erupted in laughter, which he found offensive, even though he was also offended by the bad English.

Mr. Tool and a prominent retired professor, Chen Lin, are now at the vanguard of Beijing’s English police, an effort emboldened by the Olympic self-improvement campaigns. City officials have enlisted the two scholars and other experts to retranslate the bad English translations on signs around the city. Last week, Beijing announced new standards and official translations that can be used on more than 2,000 different types of signs, as well as on menus.

Mr. Tool said he spent his weekends visiting different businesses as if he were a detective in a linguistic vice squad. “I go in and I say the Olympics are coming and this sign is wrong,” Mr. Tool said. He then sends an e-mail message with a correct translation or has a printout delivered.

He is writing a book on the subject, and no wonder: regular blunders include typos on menus in which the ‘b’ in crab becomes a ‘p.’ Some translations are trickier, like describing pullet, which is a hen less than a year old but appears on some menus as Sexually Inexperienced Chicken. Mr. Tool said one prominent sign had become a regular photo op for foreigners: the Dongda Anus Hospital.

Mr. Tool intervened. It is now the Dongda Proctology Hospital.

Score another gold medal for Beijing’s self-improvement campaign.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[BenL]

The unseen before oppulence and potemkin village feel of this Olympics reminds me of Berlin 1936 more than anything else.

[lofter1]

... City officials have enlisted the two scholars and other experts to retranslate the bad English translations on signs around the city ... regular blunders include typos on menus in which the ‘b’ in crab becomes a ‘p.’ Some translations are trickier, like describing pullet, which is a hen less than a year old but appears on some menus as Sexually Inexperienced Chicken.

Mr. Tool said one prominent sign had become a regular photo op for foreigners: the Dongda Anus Hospital.


http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/86438290_4917a90715.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/triciawang/86438290/

[ZippyTheChimp]

I wonder what they call the doctors in English.

[MidtownGuy]

That article really made me laugh. Thanks, I needed that.:)

[Zephyr]

The unseen before oppulence and potemkin village feel of this Olympics reminds me of Berlin 1936 more than anything else.

April 17, 2007

... “Public awareness of manners needs to be improved,” said Wang Tao, the soft-spoken, exceedingly polite civil servant who has become a local celebrity for his efforts to curb public spitting.... He chose a very dirty task. Public spitting is a frequent practice in Beijing and even more common elsewhere in China. (The sinus-clearing, phlegmy pre-spit hawking sound is so common that one foreigner wryly dubbed it “the national anthem of China.”) ...

“I spent six months trying to figure out how to stop people from spitting,” Mr. Wang said. “I first wanted to wipe their spit up myself, but just how much could I wipe? So I decided the best way was to ask the spitting person to stop.”

...

Beijing’s mangled English signage is not so much a bad local habit as a local institution in the eyes of resident foreigners. ... Consider that a local theme park about China’s ethnic minorities was initially promoted in English as “Racist Park.”

David Tool, an American who teaches analytical thinking at Beijing International Studies University, recalled attending a Peking Opera performance in 2001 that offered a running digital translation in English.

“They had this line that should have said ‘auspicious clouds in the sky’ but it read ‘auspicious clods,’ ” Mr. Tool recalled. He said a group of foreigners in the audience erupted in laughter, which he found offensive, even though he was also offended by the bad English....Mr. Tool said one prominent sign had become a regular photo op for foreigners: the Dongda Anus Hospital.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Darkness and Light. all in the name of showcasing the new China.

On the Light side, who could have chosen better names than these to deliver these quotes.

[Meerkat]

I love the design for the stadium, but its not quite so impressive seeing it in person - the pollution in Beijing is so bad unless you stand very close you'll hardly be able to see it.

[ZippyTheChimp]

December 29, 2007

Beijing’s Olympic Quest: Turn Smoggy Sky Blue

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/29/world/29china-600.jpg
Oded Balilty/Associated Press
Beijing residents in Tiananmen Square, used to pea-soup smog,
ignored a citywide stay-indoors warning on Thursday.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/29/world/29china.650.2.jpg
Aaron Kuo-Deemer for The New York Times
ADDED CARS, LOST HORIZONS The rush-hour haze in western
Beijing one morning this month. An additional 1,200 cars and
trucks roll into Beijing every day.

By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Every day, monitoring stations across the city measure air pollution to determine if the skies above this national capital can officially be designated blue. It is not an act of whimsy: with Beijing preparing to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, the official Blue Sky ratings are the city’s own measuring stick for how well it is cleaning up its polluted air.

Thursday did not bring good news. The gray, acrid skies rated an eye-reddening 421 on a scale of 500, with 500 being the worst. Friday rated 500. Both days far exceeded pollution levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization. In Beijing, officials warned residents to stay indoors until Saturday, but residents here are accustomed to breathing foul air. One man flew a kite in Tiananmen Square.

For Beijing officials, Thursday was especially depressing because the city was hoping to celebrate an environmental victory. In recent years, Beijing has steadily increased its Blue Sky days. The city needs one more, defined as scoring below 101, to reach its goal of 245 Blue Sky days this year. These improving ratings are how Beijing hopes to reassure the world that Olympic athletes will not be gasping for breath next August.

“We’re definitely hoping for the best,” said Jon Kolb, a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, “but preparing for the worst.”

For the world’s Olympians, Beijing’s air is a performance issue. The concern is that respiratory problems could impede athletic performance and prevent records from being broken. For the city’s estimated 12 million residents, pollution is an inescapable health and quality-of-life issue. Skepticism about the validity of the Blue Sky ratings is common. Moreover, the concern is whether the city can clean itself up long after the Games are over.

Beijing has long ranked as one of the world’s most polluted cities. To win the Games, Beijing promised a “Green Olympics” and undertook environmental initiatives now considered models for the rest of the country. But greening Beijing has not meant slowing it down. Officials also have encouraged an astonishing urbanization boom that has made environmental gains seem modest, if not illusory.

Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape by walking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgers at the same time. Polluting factories have been moved or closed. But auto emissions are rising as the city adds up to 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty, coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering the city’s sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particle pollution has been exacerbated by a staggering citywide construction binge that shows no signs of letting up.

China’s unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fast economic growth with environmental protection. But Beijing’s Olympic deadline means the city needs an immediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisions the Games as a public relations showcase and is leaving no detail untended. Scientists are cross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowers bloom in August.

Now Beijing is also going to try to manipulate air quality. For months, scientists have treated the city like a laboratory, testing wind patterns and atmospheric structure, while pinpointing local and regional pollution sources. Olympics contingency plans have been approved for Beijing and surrounding provinces. Details are not public, but officials have discussed shutting down factories and restricting traffic during the Games.

“We are determined to ensure that the air conditions meet the necessary standards in August 2008,” Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games, told the International Olympic Committee’s executive board this month.

Beijing residents overwhelmingly support the Games and take for granted that officials will do what is necessary to ensure clean air. Last August, the city removed a million cars from roads during a four-day test intended to gauge pollution and traffic. But people also know that any emergency measures have a limited shelf life.

“Yes, I heard about it,” said an engineer at one factory that may temporarily be shut down. He refused to identify himself because he was criticizing government policy. “It is like you invite some guests to your home, and hide all your children underneath the bed to make the house look nicer. If all the polluting factories are shut down for the Olympics, there will be a major pollution outbreak afterward when all the factories restart, right?”

Beijing officials say the Olympics will have a lasting and positive environmental legacy on the city. International Olympic Committee officials acknowledge that air quality remains a problem, but they say the air would be far worse without improvements made for the Games. “The general trend is improvement,” said Simon Balderstone, an environmental adviser for the I.O.C.

But pollution is expected to remain a major, long-term challenge as Beijing’s population may eventually exceed 20 million people. Scientists also say the city will never be able to clean itself up if surrounding industrial provinces are not cleaned up, too.

Blue skies, in other words, will remain a challenge.

Growth Offsets Gains

In July 2001, Beijing won the right to serve as the host of the 2008 Games, a victory that carried a touch of vindication. Eight years earlier, the International Olympic Committee had rejected Beijing’s first bid for a variety of reasons, including the city’s polluted environment.

This time, Beijing organizers promised a “Green Olympics.”

“Beijing has come a long way since its last bid in 1993,” said Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympics official, speaking at the city’s final Olympic presentation in Moscow in 2001. “The city has taken giant steps to fight pollution caused by industrialization and economic growth.”

Beijing’s environmental program had begun in 1997 and became the centerpiece of the city’s Olympic environmental commitments. Urban sewage treatment has doubled since 2001. Use of natural gas has jumped 38-fold as city officials have converted thousands of dirty coal-fired furnaces and boilers. Factories have been shut down or relocated to the suburbs. Millions of trees have been planted.

“For many years, the city had few environmental rules,” said Mr. Balderstone, the I.O.C. environmental adviser, who regularly consults with Beijing officials. “It’s like they are playing catch-up on a lot of these measures.”

But Beijing’s Olympic bid also intensified a stunning urban boom. Since 2000, Beijing’s gross domestic product has jumped 144 percent, according to Beijing Olympic officials. New office buildings and apartment towers seem to rise every week. More than 1.7 billion square feet of new construction has been started since 2002, most of it unrelated to the Olympics.

Cleaner Coal, but More of It

The emerging cityscape is often dazzling, but also energy intensive and polluting. Beijing now requires factories and power plants to burn cleaner, low-sulfur coal, but it had also hoped to reduce overall coal consumption in the years before the Olympics. Instead, the city’s coal consumption peaked at 30 million tons last year. Beijing also has only one office tower that qualifies under international and national energy efficiency standards as a green building. Construction, meanwhile, is expected to continue at a rapid pace.

“I think there will be another 20 to 30 years of urbanization,” said Wu Weijia, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Urban Studies. “The scale of construction in Beijing will not slow down after the Olympics.”

Meanwhile, an explosion of car ownership has wrought gridlocked traffic and a halo of auto fumes. Beijing now has more than three million vehicles and is adding more than 400,000 new cars and trucks each year. The city’s reliance on cars and trucks leaves its air with few reprieves. As in other Chinese cities, heavy trucks can only enter at night. Diesel exhaust is so severe that Beijing’s levels of PM 2.5, a tiny particulate deemed potentially harmful to health, is highest between midnight and 3 a.m., according to one survey.

Beijing is fighting auto pollution by instituting China’s highest vehicle emissions standards. Nearly 79,000 new taxis with lower emissions have replaced older, outdated models. But Beijing has been unwilling to discourage private car ownership by instituting exorbitant fees as Shanghai has done. Depending on the car, license plates in Shanghai can cost as much as $7,000; as a result, Shanghai adds about one-fourth as many cars per year as Beijing.

Beijing’s problems are compounded because its public transportation system was neglected for years. Now, the city is expanding subway lines and finishing a rail line from the airport to downtown, but car ownership is expected to keep rising.

“If you discourage people from having a car, the public transportation system would be overburdened,” said Mr. Wu, the Tsinghua professor.

Taking Pollution’s Measure

Mr. Kolb, the Canadian Olympic official, spent much of August in Beijing trying to answer the question hanging over the city as the Games approach: Has air quality actually improved?

An environmental physiologist, Mr. Kolb visited several stadiums, and sneaked into a few others, to measure pollution with a small monitoring device. On Aug. 5, his measurement of fine particles pollution, or PM 10, reached 200, roughly four times above the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization.

“We’re worried,” Mr. Kolb said. Of Beijing air pollution, he added: “There’s no doubt about it. It’s off the charts.”

A decade ago, Beijing introduced the Blue Sky program to measure sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and PM 10. Under the system, monitors take regular readings of each pollutant and then calculate a 24-hour average for each. The daily Blue Sky rating is determined by whichever pollutant has the highest 24-hour average.

For China’s authoritarian government, the system represented a breakthrough. But it is less stringent than air-quality indexes in the United States. Indeed, a day that rates “good” in Beijing would usually be rated polluted in the United States.

In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 Blue Sky days. Each ensuing year, the city has improved the number until reaching the current 244 and pending. Cleaner coal has helped reduce sulfur dioxide by 25 percent since 2001. Nitrogen dioxide is also down. But Beijing’s biggest problem is PM 10 and other particulates, which are attributed to construction, industry and cars.

Average daily levels of PM 10 exceed national and W.H.O. standards. In 2004, the concentration of airborne particulates in Beijing equaled that of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Atlanta combined, according to the United States Embassy in Beijing. Earlier this year, a report by the United Nations Environment Program concluded that “air pollution is still the single largest environmental and public health issue affecting the city.”

“Particularly worrying are the levels of small particulate matter (PM 10) in the atmosphere, which is severely deleterious to public health,” the report stated.

The Blue Sky system sets a maximum rating of 500, meaning that on the worst days the actual pollution level could be even higher. “Good” air in Beijing is any Blue Sky rating below 101. But even good air is often not very good; this year, Beijing has had 65 days that rated between 95 and 100. That bulge just inside the break point has attracted attention on Web sites and even at one foreign embassy, which compiled a statistical analysis casting doubt on the Blue Sky results, though the embassy’s officials refuse to discuss the findings.

Du Shaozhong, deputy director of Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau, said the ratings were not manipulated. “People used to ask me if the ratings are scientific, or if we are playing any tricks,” Mr. Du said. “But this is most advanced equipment in the world.”

Mr. Kolb said Olympic athletes were worried about ozone, which can inflame the respiratory tract and make it more difficult to breathe. But Beijing’s monitoring system does not measure ozone, nor does it measure the finer particulates known as PM 2.5.

This year, a team of Chinese and American scientists analyzed air quality issues for the Olympics and found that Beijing’s daily concentrations of PM 2.5 rated anywhere from 50 percent to 200 percent higher than American standards. Their study, published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, also found that ozone regularly exceeded levels deemed safe by American standards.

Studies are under way to assess the health impact of pollution in Beijing. One 2003 study warned that air pollution could be a major contributor to premature deaths related to chronic pulmonary disease, especially in the winter. Another study showed that visits to hospital emergency rooms rose on days with higher pollution levels.

On a recent afternoon at Beijing Hospital, Dr. Li Yi, a respiratory specialist, said he now saw 50 patients a day for respiratory problems compared with about half that a decade ago. He said asthma cases had increased sharply, as had the number of patients with nonsmoking-related lung cancer.

“You can’t say that pollution is the only reason,” Dr. Li said. “But nonsmoking-related lung cancer is now increasing more quickly.”

Beyond the Olympics

In August, Beijing marked the one-year countdown to the Games with a celebration at Tiananmen Square and several test competitions at different sites. Jacques Rogge, president of the I.O.C., applauded Beijing’s preparations, but also cautioned that pollution might force the postponement of some endurance sports.

Hu Fei, director of the Institute of Atmosphere Physics in Beijing, said any concern was misplaced. “Don’t worry about the Olympics,” Mr. Hu said, expressing confidence that contingency plans would produce clean air for the Games. “We need to be concerned about the long term.”

Mr. Hu said finding a long-term fix is difficult because of Beijing’s geography. Surrounded by mountains on three sides, Beijing depends on strong winds to disperse pollution. Yet winds also draw pollution into the city. The study in Atmospheric Environment estimated that as much as 60 percent of ozone detected at the National Stadium could be traced to outside provinces.

“Beijing is a pollution source itself, and it is surrounded by other pollution sources,” Mr. Hu said. “When you have wind, it brings in pollution from other sources. When you don’t have wind, the local pollution cannot disperse.”

Xu Jianping, 55, a business consultant, does not need to be told that Beijing is overrun with cars and construction. He is an avid in-line skater who enjoyed skating to work until pollution left him spitting out black phlegm. He went online and ordered a gas mask.

“But I don’t want to wear it,” said Mr. Xu, fearing his mask would be misinterpreted as a protest against the Olympics. “It would hurt China’s image.”

So until the Games are over, Mr. Xu is taking the bus to the office. He plans to vacation outside the city during the Games. Then, when life in Beijing returns to normal, he plans to resume skating to work — with his mask, if necessary.

Zhang Jing, Ma Yi and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/29/world/20071229_CHINA_GRAPHIC.jpg


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Out of the Blocks

Beijing’s Olympic architecture is spectacular,
but what message does it send?

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p646/080602_goldbergerweb01_p646.jpg
Photograph by Iwan Baan.
The steel lattice surrounding the Beijing National Stadium looks like a
gigantic sculpture, but most of the beams are structural, not decorative.

The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2008/06/02/080602crsk_skyline_goldberger)
by Paul Goldberger
Photographs: Iwan Baan
June 2, 2008

The Sky Line

To understand just how important the Beijing Olympics are to China, you have only to look at where the Olympic Green has been built. During Beijing’s first building boom—six hundred years before the current one—the city was laid out symmetrically on either side of a north-south axis. As in Paris—where the Louvre lines up with the Tuileries, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Champs-Élysées—Beijing’s most symbolically important structures have fallen along the main axis. In the center is the former imperial residence of the Forbidden City. North of this is the Jingshan, a park surrounding an artificial hill where the last Ming emperor is said to have hanged himself, and, beyond that, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, which for centuries helped Beijing’s inhabitants tell the time. In 1958, when the Communists expanded Tiananmen Square, at the southern gate of the Forbidden City, they placed the Monument to the People’s Heroes on the same axis, in the center of the square. Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, also in the square, is on the axis, too. And now, spread over twenty-eight hundred acres at the opposite end of the axis, is Beijing’s Olympic Green. If Tiananmen Square is a monument to the Maoist policy of self-sufficiency, the Olympic Green, ten miles and fifty years away, is an architectural statement of intent every bit as clear—a testament to the global ambitions of the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p323/080602_goldbergerweb04_p323.jpg
Outside the National Stadium.

At least two of the buildings on the Olympic Green—the National Stadium, by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and the National Aquatics Center, by the Australian firm PTW Architects—are as innovative as any architecture on the planet, marvels of imagination and engineering that few countries would have the nerve or the money to attempt. The Chinese, right now, have plenty of both. These buildings, some of the most advanced in the world, are made possible partly by the presence of huge numbers of low-paid migrant workers. When I visited the stadium with Linxi Dong, the architect who heads Herzog and de Meuron’s Beijing office, he told me that the construction crew for his project numbered nine thousand at its peak.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p646/080602_goldbergerweb03_p646.jpg
Inside the V.I.P. entrance of the National Stadium.

The National Stadium is already widely known by an apt nickname, the Bird’s Nest. The concrete wall of the arena is wrapped with a latticework exterior of crisscrossing columns and beams, a tangle of twisting steel twigs. The lattice arcs upward and inward over the stadium’s seats (there are ninety-one thousand), supporting a translucent roof and forming an oculus around the track. The center of the roof, over the field, has been left open. The engineering required to keep all this metal in the air is highly sophisticated: the building may look like a huge steel sculpture, but most of the beams are structural, not decorative. The drama of the Bird’s Nest is even more arresting than that of the Allianz Arena, the Munich soccer stadium, which Herzog and de Meuron sheathed entirely in billows of translucent plastic, in 2005. Much of the spectacle derives from the interplay of the steel lattice and the concrete shell underneath. The outer wall of the concrete structure is painted bright red—one of the building’s few overtly nationalistic touches—and when lit up at night it shines through the latticework, an enormous red egg glowing inside its nest. On leaving, you experience the excitement of the knotted metal in a new way, looking out over Beijing through the wacky frame of the slanting columns.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p646/080602_goldbergerweb02_p646.jpg
A view of Beijing National Stadium. “For all the sleek modernity of much of the construction,
there’s no mistaking the old-fashioned monumentalist approach behind it,” Goldberger writes.

Next door to the Bird’s Nest is the Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, a rectilinear building with a blue-gray exterior of translucent plastic pillows set in an irregular pattern intended to evoke bubbles. John Pauline, who is the head of the Beijing office of PTW Architects, told me that the design emerged from a desire to find a way of expressing the feeling of water. “We started out with ripples and waves and steam,” he said. “We basically looked at every state of water we could imagine. And then we hit on the idea of foam.” Working with the engineering firm Arup, which also collaborated on the Bird’s Nest, PTW developed cladding made of variously sized cells of ETFE, or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a translucent plastic somewhat similar to Teflon. Among architects, ETFE is the material of the moment—Herzog and de Meuron used it for the façade of their Munich stadium and for the roof of the Bird’s Nest—and it has many practical virtues. It weighs only one per cent as much as glass, transmits light more effectively, and is a better insulator, resulting in a thirty-per-cent saving in energy costs. Furthermore, the pillows don’t just evoke bubbles; they are bubbles, twin films of ETFE, eight one-thousandths of an inch thick, placed together to form a cell, which is then inflated.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p323/080602_goldbergerweb06_p323.jpg
The National Aquatics Center, also known as the Water Cube.

The real achievement of the Water Cube is less its technical wizardry than the transformation of the faintly trite idea of a bubble building into a piece of elegant, enigmatic architecture. The architects decided that, to play off the oval shape of the Bird’s Nest, the Aquatics Center would have to be square, and the constraint of straight lines seems to have insured that the bubble metaphor didn’t get out of hand. The Water Cube’s walls suggest the soap foam on a shower door—or perhaps, since some of the bubbles are as much as twenty-four feet across, on the slide of a microscope. From the outside, the almost random arrangement of cells establishes a kind of correspondence with the irregular struts of the Bird’s Nest. When you are inside the main hall of the Water Cube, the pattern of cells above and the green-blue tinge of the pool give you the feeling of being under water yourself and looking up toward the surface.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/06/02/p646/080602_goldbergerweb05_p646.jpg
A view of the National Aquatics Center, as seen from the National Stadium.

Although China’s burgeoning wealth owes much to its export industries, for the Olympics the country has been content to play the reverse role, buying the most futuristic architecture that the rest of the world has to offer, rather than showcasing native talent. The work of Chinese architects has largely been relegated to a jumble of functional but uninspiring buildings. (There are thirty-one Olympic venues in all.) An important exception is Digital Beijing, a control center on the Olympic Green, designed by a Chinese firm, Studio Pei Zhu. Like the Water Cube, Digital Beijing steers dangerously close to a kitschy conceit. It consists of four narrow slabs set close together in parallel to resemble a row of microchips or, perhaps, hard drives. Some of the walls have glass cutouts in a linear pattern clearly designed to evoke a circuit board—they light up green at night. Yet the finished building has a dignity that is surprising. This is due in part to Pei Zhu’s choice of materials—the walls are clad in a sober grayish stone—and in part to the proportions of the four slabs, whose narrowness and lack of adornment give the building an austerity that is the opposite of kitsch.

Pei Zhu may be Chinese, but his building is thoroughly international in style. (He was educated at the University of California and has worked both in China and abroad.) Indeed, apart from the red of the Bird’s Nest, there is little that is traditionally Chinese in any of the Olympic developments. The scale and ambition of the project is an unmistakable statement of national pride, yet China, strangely, has been content to make this statement using the vocabulary of the kind of international luxury-modernism that you might just as easily see in Dubai or SoHo or Stuttgart—dizzyingly complex computer-generated designs, gorgeously realized in fashionable materials. The message seems clear: anything you can do, we can do better.

The first Olympic Games of the modern era, in 1896, were held in an ancient stadium in Athens that the Greeks refurbished for the occasion. The swimming events took place in the Aegean Sea. The next Olympics, in Paris in 1900, had no stadium at all. The track-and-field competitions were held on the streets of the city and on the grass of the Bois de Boulogne, which the French did not want to disfigure with a proper track. Swimmers were left to cope with the currents of the Seine.

The idea that cities could attract the Olympics by promising lavish facilities probably began after 1906, when the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius put an end to a plan to have the 1908 Games in Rome. The British saw Italy’s misfortune as an opportunity and offered to build a stadium big enough to hold a hundred and fifty thousand people, in Shepherd’s Bush, London. The White City Stadium, as it was called, was the first stadium to be erected specifically for the Olympics. Soon, countries were openly vying with one another to host the Games. (What is the Olympic ideal, after all, but national rivalry dressed up as global amity?) The apogee of triumphalism was reached, notoriously, in Berlin, in 1936, when Hitler, who wasn’t yet in power when the Games were awarded to the city, embraced the Olympics as the way to show off the might of the Nazi regime. Architecture was as much a part of his vision as the gold medals, though his taste ran to the turgid and overblown. He tore down a perfectly good, barely used stadium, replaced it with the largest stadium in the world, and then built a hundred-and-thirty-acre Olympic Village, with a hundred and forty buildings laid out in the shape of a map of Germany.

Since the Second World War, host countries have avoided such bombastic excess, but they have usually seen the Olympics as an opportunity to pin a gold medal on one or more of their leading architects. There was Pier Luigi Nervi’s innovative, seemingly floating concrete dome on his stadium for the Rome Olympics, in 1960; Kenzo Tange’s swooping, sculptural gymnasium for Tokyo, in 1964; Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto’s canopied stadium for Munich, in 1972. For the Barcelona Olympics, in 1992, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was enlisted to build a communications tower that would serve as an Olympic symbol. Calatrava’s angular, precarious-looking design, inspired by an arm holding the Olympic torch, established his world-wide reputation and remains one of the city’s most visible structures. But the Barcelona Olympics also marked a new approach to Olympic architecture, one that placed as much emphasis on the relationship between the city and its facilities as on the sports venues themselves. Barcelona used the Games as an occasion to redevelop its waterfront and design a series of new parks, fountains, and works of public art to attract tourists after the Games were over. Since then, cities have been keen to use the Olympics to leverage other civic improvements, on the premise that if you’re spending billions to refurbish a city you should at least invest in buildings that have long-term utility. That’s why the legacy of the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, isn’t any of the athletic buildings but a major new park and housing for athletes that became new dormitories for Georgia Tech.

The plan for the 2012 Olympics, in London, takes this idea a step further. Although there is one flashy commission for a British architect (an aquatics center, designed by Zaha Hadid, in the form of a giant wave), the London Olympics are distinctly short on architectural extravaganzas. The main stadium, to be designed by a large American firm that has had a lock on football and baseball stadiums for years, will be dull compared to the Bird’s Nest. When I talked to Ricky Burdett, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics, who is an adviser to the London Olympics, he told me that London did not feel the need to prove itself through spectacular works of Olympic architecture. “We had a big debate over whether we should build a new stadium at all,” he said. “We were much more interested in how an intervention on this scale will affect a city socially and culturally.” The British government plans to invest roughly nineteen billion dollars in an Olympic site, in the East End of London. When the Olympics end, much of the area will become a park, and sales of private development sites around it are expected to enable the government to recoup much of its investment. Burdett said, “London has always been poor in the east and rich in the west. The London Olympics can rebalance London.”

Beijing, evidently, has other priorities. For all the sleek modernity of much of the construction, there’s no mistaking the old-fashioned monumentalist approach behind it. This is an Olympics driven by image, not by sensitive urban planning. It’s true that there has been a much needed and well-executed expansion of Beijing’s subway system, but most of the impact of the Olympics has been cosmetic—the trees planted along the expressway to the airport, for example, or the cleanup of some of the roadways leading to the Olympic Green. Bordering one stretch of congested elevated ring road, stone walls, like the ones surrounding the old Beijing hutongs, or alleyway neighborhoods, have been erected. But, with not much behind them, they are little more than a stage set—Potemkin hutongs designed to distract visitors from the fact that so many real hutongs are being demolished for high-rise construction. In today’s Beijing, forcible eviction is common, and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced to make way for the Olympics. The brightness of the Olympic halo gives Beijing’s relentless expansion a surface sheen, but it’s only a distraction from the city’s deeper planning problems, such as air and water pollution and overcrowding.

In general, the Chinese authorities have been less interested in solving these problems than in keeping the construction engine going at full throttle. Still, the Olympic site did require some planning and, in 2002, a competition was held to create a master plan. It attracted entries from ninety-six architects around the world, and was won by a Boston firm, Sasaki Associates. Despite its straight-line connection to the Forbidden City, the Olympic Green lies in a district that, in recent years, has become a forest of undistinguished high-rise apartment buildings and commercial towers. (The site also includes a mundane athletic compound erected for the 1985 Asian Games, and these leftover structures are all being refurbished for the Olympics.) Dennis Pieprz, the president of Sasaki, who was in charge of the scheme, explained to me that the firm struggled for a long time with the question of how to treat Beijing’s axis. The Chinese tradition of aligning important public buildings created “a huge temptation to put the stadium right on the axis,” he said. “But we decided that in the twenty-first century we were beyond that, and that we should, instead, symbolize infinity, and the idea of the people in the center, not a building.” So Sasaki placed the stadium just to the east of the axis and the Water Cube just to the west; the space directly on the axis was left open.

Pieprz told me that he felt that considering the long-term use of the site was essential. “We needed a plan that could accept other civic, cultural, recreational, and commercial uses, so the place would become a major destination,” he said. Sasaki envisions the Olympic site as becoming a large park, with each of the major buildings taking on a public function. The Bird’s Nest will remain as the national stadium, its capacity reduced to a more practical eighty thousand by the removal of several tiers of seats; the Water Cube will lose almost two-thirds of its seventeen thousand seats, the upper tiers to be replaced by multipurpose rooms. “You are making a city, not a spatial extravaganza that will be interesting just for sixteen days,” Pieprz said.

But, whatever the architects feel, it’s not clear that the Chinese are really that interested in long-term uses. The focus is on August, and on confirming before the world Beijing’s status as a modern, global city. However well the buildings are refitted afterward, it’s hard to see how the Olympic park will relate to the rest of the city, beyond being a welcome piece of green space in an increasingly built-up, sprawling metropolis. The success of what China has built for the Olympics will ultimately be measured not by how these buildings look during the Games but by the kind of change they bring about in the city. The billions of dollars spent on the Olympic site, after all, are only a fraction of the money that has been invested in construction in Beijing since the Games were awarded to the city, in 2001. The city, however, has yet to build a public space as inventive as that of post-Olympics Barcelona, or to think of the impact of the Olympics in terms as sophisticated as pre-Olympics London. In both conception and execution, the best of Beijing’s Olympic architecture is unimpeachably brilliant. But the development also exemplifies traits—the reckless embrace of the fashionable and the global, the authoritarian planning heedless of human cost—that are elsewhere denaturing, even destroying, the fabric of the city. ♦

Copyright © 2008 CondéNet

[Jasonik]

That looks FANTASTIC!


WOW.

[Alonzo-ny]

Beijing Olympic Bird's Nest ready

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44787000/jpg/_44787295_stadium_getty226b.jpg

The IOC is worried about Beijing's air pollution

The main venue for Beijing's Olympic Games - the "Bird's Nest" stadium - is complete and fully operational, Chinese officials have said.

The 91,000-seat stadium will host the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies as well as athletics events.

A network of steel girders gives the stadium its nest-like appearance. All 37 venues for the Games are now ready.

The International Olympic Committee has praised Beijing's preparations, but said air quality was a concern.

The Bird's Nest - or National Stadium - was designed by award-winning Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron and Chinese architect Li Xinggang.

The design beat dozens of other entries in a worldwide competition held in 2003.

"The Bird's Nest is the last completed Olympic venue but the best," said project manager Tan Xiaochun.

The project was completed at a cost of $500m (£250m).

"You can imagine yourself to be an athlete, standing at the centre of the venue attracting thousands of eyes," said Li Xinggang.

"You will be turned on by the audience's cheers, feeling at the centre of a stage. It will lead you to final success."

[lofter1]

Damn -- that air quality is below bad http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon13.gif

Hope we don't have to watch athletes collapsing on the race trcks.

[Alonzo-ny]

Id be worried, the way athletes suck in alot of air really cant be good. That stadium would be doing well to be enclosed.

[Tectonic]

New York's been looking like those smoggy pictures lately. I think its the weather more than the pollution though.

[lofter1]

That ^ is what they say in LA, too:

"Oh, it's just haze. It's natural for here."

Right ... smoke + fog + particulates = haze

= smog

When I was out in CA in May I couldn't believe how terrible the air LOOKED.

At least here in NYC the buildings hide it :cool:

[Tectonic]

:o was trying to be optimistic, lol.

[lofter1]

Based on the info HERE (http://www.citymayors.com/environment/polluted_uscities.html) (from May 2008) you 're right to be optimistic ...

NYC did NOT make it into the TOP 10 Most Polluted US Cities for either short-term particle pollution (#1: Pittsburgh, with 4 of the Top 10 being California cities) or for year-round particle pollution (#1: LA, with 5 of the Top 10 being California cities).

NYC did however rank as #5 on the list for most polluted US cities by ozone (#1: again, LA and again with 5 of the Top 10 being California cities).

[Tectonic]

Interesting. Not surprised to see Atlanta on there too.

[Gabyrpg]

Awesome post, thanks! commission de surendettement (http://commissiondesurendettement.net)

[scumonkey]

Yes it is, and NY is #8 on the list - not #5;)