All in one day! CCTV was disappointing, because there was a huge wall surrounding the building, and we couldn’t get anywhere near it. Could’ve had something to do with the big fire that happened there a couple of years ago, that CCTV famously didn’t even report on. But, it was good to see it and get a sense of the scale. It was HUGE.
The Bird’s Nest and Water Cube were both pretty great, and I was prepared to not like them. The sites were pretty bustling, but in a culture with no big-arena sports, the Bird’s Nest especially is more of a gigantic inhabitable sculpture. Not that there’s anything wrong with that conceptually, but it does seem a colossal waste of space, money [$15 million/year upkeep!], and resources. The Water Cube at least has a water park inside, which was completely packed when we were there…
The Bird's Nest also brought up nagging questions about complication of building forms. For me, shapes like the Bird's Nest are beautiful, but not expressive of much other than that form - certainly it's not tied to any expression of the materials or the construction methods. The welded seams in the metal cladding around the steel structure were clearly visible, and had little to do with the abstract [and I mean abstract from construction logic] shapes of the architecture. Here is an example of something modeled in a computer program, then shoehorned into existing construction methods and made to look as if it were spun from string or whatever. I guess I'm usually in the opposite camp, where the construction methods, materials, or hybrids thereof inform the form. In either case, though, "honesty" of form, material, method comes into play - I think, as usual, the designer has to choose what to lie about.
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| CCTV Building, OMA, Beijing. |
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| National Stadium ["Bird's Nest"], Herzog and deMeuron, Beijing. |
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| National Stadium ["Bird's Nest"], Herzog and deMeuron, Beijing. |
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| National Aquatics Center ["Water Cube"], Herzog and deMeuron, Beijing. |
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