Beijing 2008

from Domus 860 June 2003

Herzog and de Meuron’s stadium will be the defining architectural

image of the Beijing Olympics.

Despite the SARS epidemic that is threatening to derail China’s economic

boom and undermine the authority of its political leadership, the Chinese
government is determined that nothing will stand in the way of the

successful staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

China is using the games to signal that it has moved beyond its

sweatshop economy, characterised by low-wage commodity production,

bicycles, social conformity and corruption. To this end it is pressing ahead
with a building programme that is ambitious even by the feverishly

overheated standards of exploding Asian cities.

The Chinese were still concealing the true extent of the SARS outbreak in

April when they announced that the competition to design the Olympic
stadium had been won by Herzog and de Meuron. They were more

forthcoming about the epidemic by the time the shortlist for the

competition for the Olympic pool was unveiled in May. But they were still

determined that construction would begin on the stadium this year. In

fact, with a reminder of the authoritarian planning methods of the Mao

era, they had already set a precise date and time: December 24 at 10
am. And work on the pool is scheduled to start even earlier, with the date

and time announced before the architect was actually selected.

The pool and the stadium are just two of the major projects underway in

the Chinese capital. Rem Koolhaas has won the competition to design a

headquarters building in the form of a cluster of towers for Chinese
television. And Albert Speer is busy promoting his plan for a 24-

kilometre-long north-south axis for Beijing, running all the way from the

Olympic site in the north, where Herzog and de Meuron’s stadium will

occupy a prominent position on a slight hill, to a huge new railway station

in the south.

Stung by previous criticisms of its sometimes murky approach to the

allocation of construction contracts, Beijing’s municipality has been

proclaiming its determination to pursue design excellence and maintain a

transparent and fair tendering process. This is why the competition had a

somewhat unwieldy 13-strong jury, whose members included seven

Chinese experts alongside Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Kisho Kurokawa,
José Luis Mateo and Benedetta Tagliabue. Also on the jury was

Dominique Perrault, who was also a finalist in the swimming pool

competition, in which he was up against Norman Foster, Shin Takamatsu,

Rafael Viñoly and others.

Although the shortlist included Vittorio Gregotti, it was mainly
characterized by the usual collection of firms known only by their initials,

which have come to dominate international stadium design by turning out

an interchangeable series of huge spectator machines that can process

crowds quickly and efficiently yet lack personality or charisma. In this

context, the appointment of Herzog and de Meuron may be seen as a
sophisticated choice. It demonstrates that China has reached the stage

where it does not need to do the obvious thing. In so doing, the Chinese

have secured a structure that will undoubtedly upstage Sydney’s Olympic

stadium, with its now-conventional arrangement of structural masts.

Beijing will have the most memorable stadium since Frei Otto’s tents for

Munich.

A retractable roof can be
used to close the stadium for
indoor events and in poor
weather. Herzog and de
Meuron deliberately avoid a

technocratic structure

An open concourse distributes
spectators to the three
seating tiers

In the stadium the audience
becomes the architecture

Herzog and de Meuron
deliberately avoid a
technocratic structure

Herzog and de Meuron have designed stadiums before. They did a

relatively modest football stadium in Basel and a big one for Munich,

driven as much as anything by Jacques Herzog’s well-known personal

passion for football. But Beijing is different. Football, with its
confrontation between two goal mouths, requires a very different

atmosphere from a stadium where activities are concentrated around the

rim. The proportions and sightlines are not the same. Herzog and de

Meuron’s proposal is both radical and very simple. The Beijing stadium,

seating 100,000 people, will be like no other. The architects call it a

‘bird’s nest’. It is formed from an apparently random pattern of structural
bands rising out of the ground to create the stadium bowl, almost like a

gigantic version of a papier-mâché structure built up from layers of paper

strips overlaid on a mould.

The structure is composed of a network of ‘woven’ together concrete

elements, with the gaps in the structure filled in with what the architects
call ‘inflatable cushions’. Spectators reach their seats by walking through

the nest structure into a concourse, treated as a covered urban space

lined by shops, cafés and restaurants. From here they move by sets of

stairs to one of the three seating tiers. According to Herzog, ‘We wanted

to get away from the usual technocratic stadiums, with their architecture

dominated by structural spans and digital screens’.

In Beijing there will be no distinction between architectural facade and

structure. ‘It is simple and almost archaically direct in its spatial impact.

The crowd is the architecture. The regular proportions are intended to

shift the spectators and the track and field events into the foreground’.

The structure is composed of
a network of ‘woven’ together
concrete elements, with the
gaps in the structure filled in
with what the architects call
‘inflatable cushions’