Two buildings that argue with each other
The Olympic Green sits on the northern extension of the city's central axis, and its two principal buildings were designed within a few years of each other as opposite answers to the same question - how does a structure look honest? The National Stadium exposes everything: its steel trusses wrap around the seating bowl and are the building. The National Aquatics Centre hides nothing either, but in a completely different material, a cube of bubbles. Together with the later speed-skating oval they form the group that the city now calls the Double Olympic centre, and this day is about how they were built, how they were used twice, and what a host city does with a stadium afterwards.
Morning - the Bird's Nest
The National Stadium covers 20.4 hectares, with 258,000 square metres of building and seats for 91,000 spectators; it measures 333 metres north to south and 296 east to west and rises 69 metres. It was designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron with the China Architecture Design and Research Group, the Chinese side led by Li Xinggang, and the brief they answered was unusually literal - no applied ornament, no cladding over the frame, the geometry of the seating bowl expressed directly as a woven lattice. We walk it with a guide who explains the structural problem of a bowl that wide with no columns in front of the seats, and then the second act: the stadium was the main venue of the 2008 Games and in 2022 it hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Games, which makes it one of very few venues in the world to have opened both a summer and a winter Games.
Lunch
Lunch in the Olympic Green area.
Afternoon - the Water Cube, and the question of legacy
The National Aquatics Centre was begun in December 2003 and finished in January 2008. It is 177 metres on each side and thirty metres high, with a total floor area of between sixty-five and eighty thousand square metres, and its outer skin is a cushion wall of ETFE foil - the bubbles you see are structural, and they make the building behave like a greenhouse. It hosted swimming, diving and synchronised swimming in 2008, and it is the only Olympic venue in the city built with donations from Chinese communities overseas, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Then the interesting part. In November 2020 the conversion works were signed off, and the pool hall became an ice rink: the same building, now the Ice Cube, hosted the curling at the 2022 Winter Games and produced four gold medals. Your guide uses that conversion to open the wider question of what happens to Olympic infrastructure after the event, and the park around you - the reserved land, the venues still in use, the ones that were never built - is the evidence for the answer.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
