Olympic Green

"Bird's Nest" at Night

Thankfully Beijing might have one of the most foreigner friendly subway systems in the world. Everything is in English and there is even a voice that comes on when a transfer station is approaching that gives you a list of reasons you might want to change trains (like "Change to Line 10 for Olympic Stadiums"). This makes it pretty easy to get up to the Olympic Green in Beijing.

Bird's Nest and Kids Warming Up for Roller Speed Skating

The park is huge. I can't imagine how this placed looked when it was full of people.Now it just looks empty and a little sad. I hope they can continue to keep the stadiums looking nice and maybe even find a good use for them.

Looking Back Toward "The Olympic Green"

Beijing National Stadium, more commonly known as the Bird's Nest, is a 80,000 seat stadium and was the center of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The opening, and closing ceremonies as well as the gold medal soccer match were held here. There were plans to continue using it as a stadium, however a total lack of interest has torpedoed this plan. The newest plan is to convert the stadium into more of a shopping/dining area similar to the Worker's Stadium Area. This way the stadium can be used part time and can still be a revenue generating area during the long breaks between events held at the stadium.

Bird's Nest at Night

There is tons and tons of information to be found concerning the architecture of the stadium. I started at the Wikipedia article and branched out from there browsing the source links at the bottom. Long story short, the mesh of steel on the outside was designed to hide the structure and systems for the retractable roof. During the course of the project the budget was reduced and the retractable roof did not make the cut, but the outer design of the stadium was left unchanged.

Water Cube Lit Up

The Beijing National Aquatics Center, aka the Water Cube, hosted all of the aquatic events during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Again, there is tons of information out there on the structure and design process but here are a some highlights. The structure of the building is created using a steel space frame, the the ETFE(awesome plastic) bubbles were laid on top of it. More than1 million sq ft. 0.2 mm thick ETFE was used to form ~4,000 bubbles of various sizes that were then laid on the structure.

One of the results of thin plastic covering, is the ability to see inside the "Cube" down to the water if you look in just the right places.

Reflections from Inside the Water Cube

Also turns out the Water Cube isn't really a cube, more of a cuboid...fun fact (in case you cared?).

Anyway, cool place, cool stadiums but I have no idea how these are not going to be rundown symbols of excess in 10 more years. Kind of a disappointing thought, but Beijing may turn into a lesson of how not to build Olympic villages, i.e. build incredible stadiums far from downtown without a business plan outside of the Olympics and go broke doing it. In that sense, while disappointing that Chicago didn't get the 2016 Olympics, they may just have dodged a bullet.

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