The Swallow Nest

The Swallow Nest
The Swallow Nest

Video: The Swallow Nest

Video: The Swallow Nest
Video: Modd & Hosini - Swallow's Nest 2024, March
Anonim

The most striking and interesting building of the entire complex of the Beijing Olympic Village, the new arena is designed for 91,000 spectators (after the end of the Olympics, the number of seats there will be reduced to 85,000). The dimensions of the stadium are 320 x 297 m, the height is 69 m.

But its attractiveness and originality are not in the physical characteristics. Essentially, the new building has no walls. Its “outer skeleton”, a graceful interweaving of silvery steel beams, is simultaneously the floor, and the facades, and the supporting structure of the building. Inside you can see a bright red concrete bowl of the arena itself, but all additional premises: shops, cafes, boxes, etc. each have their own shell, the architects managed to do without a common impenetrable barrier around the building. This decision made it possible to dispense with artificial ventilation of a huge structure. Where protection from the weather was still needed, inflatable Teflon "cushions" were used. The floors of the stadium are also made of translucent plastic that transmits ultraviolet light: so that the lawn grass on the field does not dry out.

The arena itself has not a standard oval, but an almost perfectly round shape, which makes all spectator seats equally convenient for observing the competition.

The role of the lobby of the Olympic Stadium is played by a spacious corridor with cafes and shops, passing between the "architectural forest" of the outer structure, as Jacques Herzog called it, and the walls of the arena.

The project received the nickname "Bird's Nest" from the people of Beijing in March 2003, when it was announced that the Herzog & de Meuron project had won an architectural competition. Such an unofficial name is associated in China with extremely positive concepts: uniqueness, exclusivity, value. All this is not least due to one of the main delicacies of Chinese cuisine - the nests of swift swiftlets.

At the same time, the new stadium, not only an interesting example of modern architecture of sports facilities, but also a notable construction of the Chinese capital, which became a popular attraction even during construction, is now associated with a political scandal. Ai Weiwei, an outstanding Chinese artist, worked on his project together with Swiss architects. Now he actually renounced his authorship for political reasons: Weiwei opposed the Beijing Olympics in general, comparing it with a "fake smile", and the stadium, the aesthetic qualities of which he does not deny, is, according to the artist, a "PR stunt" by the Chinese authorities …

But, despite the ambiguous nature of the 2008 Games, it was thanks to them that the wonderful stadium "Herzog & de Meuron" was born, which once again makes us think about the question of the moral responsibility of any "creator" working for totalitarian and those close to that worries many Western architects. him modes. It should be noted that Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron said that most likely they would not be at the opening of the Olympics, but they mentioned that this decision was not related to politics.

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