The Bird's Nest.

The Bird’s Nest.

Visiting the Olympic Garden in the Northern part of Beijing these days is a little bit like going to a mausoleum. The park, contrary to its present lack of TV coverage, still exists, scattered with the enormous remains of this year’s Games. The newly opened subway lines, in place to ferry guests back and forth between venues, are newly closed. There are no more reporters, no more athletes, no more photo finishes, no more medals to be awarded, so what’s left? For one thing, there are more fences.

But if you had to choose one building to symbolize the voracious energy of this year’s Olympics, set in a country trying desperately to prove itself to the world, you could do worse than the Bird’s Nest. I would be willing to guess that the majority of people on the planet have seen it at least once, a latticework of steel beams, graphic and iconic, with a characteristic dimpled top.

Countless wide-eyed critics have noted the building’s embrace of “openness”, the way it allows the eye to travel from the exterior to the interior and back freely, a consequence of its exuberant yet simple façade. They cite the fact that the Chinese government consented to this design as a symbol of China’s own increasing “openness”, openness to the West, openness in an economic sense, openness in a social sense. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take them at their word. There are times when it pays to look a little deeper into the context of such a place instead of linking the façade, literally and figuratively, to the changing ideology of the country it’s built in.

Still, the Bird’s Nest is undeniably a loose building. It’s a little shaky, a little more of a laugh than a frown. The photos that have been widely published, a far off perspective, a wide-angle lens, don’t do the building’s spirit justice. The Bird’s Nest dances around you as you walk through it. A few steps into the stadium, the geometric flatness of the façade becomes a riot of crisscrossing lines going everywhere in all 3 dimensions, a Dr. Suess landscape in a metallic future.


The color palate of the building, a fitting deep red mixed with the gray of steel, also enlivens the interior stadium. A surprisingly small playing field surrounded by seats colored the same deep red, the space doesn’t quite match the epic scale it had on the television screen. More than color though, what brings the Bird’s Nest its exuberance is the slicing interplay between light and shade just inside the façade. The shadows are sharp enough to cut yourself on, and the patches of light beam down in heptagons.

The rhythms play themselves like a symphony of synthesizers.


The Bird’s Nest is a great piece of architecture. Still, we don’t have to take this postmodern smiley face at first blush. The team that designed the stadium is a bit of a surprise: the always great, always willing to embrace the new, architectural firm of Herzog and De Meuron, working with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a known provocateur who once filmed himself dropping Ming Dynasty vases onto his studio floor, smashing them into pieces. In this more civilized role, he was labeled a 'design consultant'.

The two have worthy reputations as artists, and it’s a credit to the Chinese government that they were willing to support the team in building such an avant garde structure. And yet, looking a little deeper still: in the process of building, Ai Weiwei renounced any involvement with the project, reviling his involvement with the Chinese government and loudly criticizing China’s continued human rights problems.

Herzog and De Meuron haven’t commented apart from reaffirming that Ai Weiwei was an incredible help and influence on the project. Architects are said to be colorless in the face of such international politics as long as the money is there, and many have faced criticism for building in Communist China.


And then there are the fences. The Olympic park is now crisscrossed with high white fences, blocking off the natural flow of people in and around the mammoth structures. A ticket to get into the Bird’s Nest is 50 RMB, about 8 USD, which doesn’t sound like much, but for an afternoon outing it really is prohibitively expensive for a lot of Chinese. Across from the Bird’s Nest is the Water Cube, another 30RMB to even get close to; the fences start 100 feet away.


The problems, the political flashpoints and the are still there, they’re just not immediately clear. The Bird’s Nest is an incredible experience for those that can get in. It’s a shame that some of the artistry and the public accomplishment of the Olympic venues have been lost to politics and profit.

But still, the taste the stadium leaves in your mouth is like skittles.


PS: Hiroshi Sugimoto is my best friend.