Beijing National Stadium

From WikiRun

The Beijing National Stadium, also known as the National Stadium,^[1] or the "Bird's Nest" (鳥巢) for its architecture, is a stadium finished for the Olympic Green in Beijing, China that opened in March 2008.^[2] The stadium will host the main track and field competitions for the 2008 Summer Olympics, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies. A Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron Architekten AG, collaborated with China Architecture Design & Research Group to design it. The National stadium features a lattice-like concrete skeleton forming the stadium bowl and will have a seating capacity of 80,000 people. Architects originally described the overall design as resembling a Bird nest with an immense ocular—an opening with a retractable roof over the stadium. However, in 2004, the idea of retractable roof was abandoned for economic and safety reasons. The stadium's designer Ai Weiwei has since withdrawn his support for China's Olympic games, saying "he wants nothing to do with them anymore".^[3]^[4]

1 Design
2 Capacity
3 References
4 External links

Design

In 2002, Government officials engaged architects worldwide in a design competition. Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron collaborated with ArupSport and China Architecture Design & Research Group to win the competition. Contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, is the Artistic Consultant for design.^[5] The ground was broken on Christmas Eve December 2003, and construction started in March 2004, but was halted by the high construction cost in August 2004 and continued again. In January 2008, concerns about construction working conditions arose when it was revealed that 2 workers had died during the stadium's construction.^[6]

Capacity

The stadium can seat as many as 91,000 spectators during the Olympics. The capacity will then be reduced to 80,000 after the Games. It has replaced the original intended venue of the Guangdong Olympic Stadium. The stadium is 330 metres long by 220 metres wide, and is 69.2 metres tall. The stadium uses 258,000 square meters of space and has a usable area of 204,000 square meters. It was built with 36 km of unwrapped steel, with a combined weight of 45,000 tons. The stadium has some 11,000 square meters of underground rooms with waterproof walls. The stadium will cost up to 3.5 billion yuan (≈423 million USD).