Ines Alvarez
Professor David Rifkind
ARC 2701
Observation essay
While analyzing the broad sphere of athletic stadiums, there is one structure that completely revolutionized their design and placement in the design world, the Beijing National Stadium. Known as “The Bird’s Nest”, the national stadium carries one of the most challenging designs so far when it comes to sports arena. However, the product of this challenge was portrayed to the audience as a delightful sight to the eye. It is a combination of chaos and precision, each component perfectly arranged to support the physical structure while maintaining the elaborate design. At simple sight, it is intriguing because it is such a complex structure that it can be perceived as a disorganized composition that when examined closely, it’s very detailed and well-crafted. Or vice versa, it can be understood as a majestic structure but when inspected, it becomes a confusing set of lines going in all directions.
The arena was built to fulfill a specific purpose, to serve as a venue for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.The entire idea of this architectural work is very simple, a stadium where the audience would feel the same excitement they experience in the games, while just looking at the architecture of the building. The work resulted from a collaboration between architects Herzog & de Meuron, artist Ai WeiWei and the Arup Group. The design process was complex itself, it was a competition of thirteen designs in which the winner was chosen by a panel of judges and the Chinese people. The Bird’s Nest resulted as the winner of the competition in 2003 which initiated the magnificent structure used for the games and that gave a new perspective on the design of arenas in the world.
Beijing went through a five-year preparation before hosting the Olympics. The Chinese people had to prepare for it, the government needed an enormous economic contribution, a new complex of athletic structures were built in order to satisfy the requirements for the Olympic games. This new complex is situated on the Olympic Green, north Beijing. The site was used for all new Olympic-related buildings, each for different sports. The land underneath the National Stadium is mostly flat, however, there are some parts with elevations, in which Herzog & de Meuron used different elevations to accommodate the viewer’s point of view to the field.
The National Stadium was just one out of the several edifications made for the Olympic games, however, it became the main attraction due to its attractive design and the popular idea, yet not necessarily true, that the design was based off an actual bird’s nest. In reality, the original concept was drawn from local Chinese art, the crackle-glazed pottery. The designers were challenged to make the structure resistant to earthquakes, which has a big part on the complete design. At the begging, the roof was designed to be retractable but due to design complications they decided to work in a different way. The new design consisted of making the bowl of the stadium able to separate into six different sections.
An elliptical shape conforms the great stadium. The first part of the design is the bowl which consists of the main field and the seating area surrounding the field while going up. The second is the facade and roof of the structure. The two parts are surprisingly separated for structural reasons so it is able to resist the seismic activity.
Most resistance to earthquakes can be seen trough the bowl design. It is perfectly divided into six different segments so that if seismic activity were to happen, the structure would not crash on its entirety. Since the roof and facade are not directly connected, it wouldn’t completely collapse. The bowl consists of seven levels going up to occupy the seating spaces and is balanced so that every spectator has the same angle of view to the field. A red color can be seen on the outside wall of the bowl.The biggest challenge while making the design for the roof was that the Bird’s Nest was constructed for the Olympic games as a destination, but Herzog & de Meuron needed a design that would serve after as a soccer stadium.
The facade and roof can be almost be seen as an addition to the bowl design, but they are essentially what give life to the design as well. The structure wouldn’t have cause such an impact as it has if it wasn’t for the intriguing lines that conform the facade. What tricks most people and surprises about this design is that the entire facade of the building is an open space. There are no walls or crystal glass. In this case, the facade is made out of steel. These steel lines are the main part of the stadium; they serve as the columns, the supporting walls, they are ornamental but also functional. Although the facade is not directly connected to the bowl, the designer’s team designed the arena in a way that the main stairs of the building come out of the steel columns to go up and around the stadium and finally connect with the bowl and be able to walk to the seats.
It is easy to find yourself wondering if the steel columns come out to connect with the stairs, then how are the columns placed?. Even when they look like there isn’t any specific direction or pattern with the steel lines, there is. The steel lines on the facade are arranged in three different categories. The first are for structural support, so that the building can stand on its own; they serve as columns. The second layer of lines is to connect the stairs to the roof, so the connection is actually made from the top down. And finally, the third layer of steel is to connect the first and second layer. Although they get all together and some might mix into just one line, it is possible to blend all three layers and not see the inside process, much like the connecting lines we use to turn a square into a three-dimensional cube but ultimately erase.
The roof itself is quite surprising. It serves as a decoration but the actual purpose it has is to protect people from sun and rain. The roof doesn’t extend to the field, so there is an open space in the middle of the roof followed by the outline of the seating areas that have roof above them. However, on the outside, the roof does come down to unite with the steel and becomes both facade and roof. But how is this possible? The material used to cover the roof area is a layer of ETFE (ethyltetra uoroethylene) membrane, which is thin and slightly transparent. This material in combination with the steel lines coming to the top of the roof make it possible to hold the structure but it is necessary to take the ETFE a little down so it can be connected to the bottom as well.
It is clearly that the open facade is one of the main challenges and successes of this structure. However, one fascinating aspect is that with the building’s facade being almost completely open, the lighting condition plays an important role on the overall image of the arena. Lighting can make so many changes on the way we perceive things. The interior lighting we see on the Bird’s Nest is the same light that reflects on the exterior of it. In the morning, with natural light, the color of the facade is completely light gray. However, at night, the white lights on the inside reflect to the outside but they drastically change when the light meets the red painted wall on the exterior of the bowl. The projection of colors we see then shift from bright white to a strong red, color which now the steel adopts. The original concept for the lighting of the stadium was to allow the stadium to shine from within. Herzog & de Meuron designed the Bird’s Nest to be a landmark building and they though there was no better way than to let the architecture speak on its own. The lights make an impressive view on the building that it’s just breathtaking because all the light is shining from the inside, meaning that there is something really great on the inside.
The Beijing National Stadium is a masterpiece in any possible way we look at it. All structures have their story behind, something great why they were built. The stadium captures that idea in the sense that sports can really bring people together, they cause an unexplainable emotion. The architects created a physical structure that allows to feel the same excitement by just walking into the building, wondering how it was made, how it connects. The lighting effect shows that something great awaits on the inside, and even if it’s not on a religious or political aspect, the arena brought a whole country together. A new hope that their country, their home, could host Olympic games, could have architectural structures never seen before and could do anything; be better and do greater things, and that is what real architecture should be all about.
Bibliography:
Weiwei, Ai. “Beijing National Stadium,2002-2008.” in Ai Weiwei, Spatial Matters: Art, Architecture and Activism, edited by Anthony Pins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, ed. Olympic Architecture: Beijing 2008. Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2008.
Culley, Peter, and John Pascoe. Stadium and Arena Design. Second ed. London: ICE Publishing, 2015.
Lin, Xiaoping. “Discourse and Displacement: Contemplating Beijing’s Urban Landscape.” in Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.
Cha, Victor D. “The Olympic Facelift” in Beyond the Final Score: the Politics of Sport in Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Brown, David J., ed. “The Beijing National Stadium Special Issue.” The Arup Journal 44.1 (2009) .Web.