Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium Opens the Olympics

On 28 June 2008, the Beijing National Stadium officially opened on the Olympic Green in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. Built to serve as the centerpiece of China's first Summer Olympic Games, the facility occupied a site of about 20 hectares and had a total floor area of 258,000 square meters and offered a seating capacity of 91,000 during the competition. The project emerged from an international design contest launched in 2002 that drew thirteen final entries, requiring a structure adaptable to post-Games life with minimal maintenance. The winning proposal was formally selected in April 2003, conceived by Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron alongside the China Architecture Design and Research Group, with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei participating as an artistic consultant.

The architects sought to create a porous civic vessel and drew creative inspiration from the forms of Chinese ceramics. Their blueprint separated the arena into two independent components spaced fifty feet apart: an interior red concrete bowl and an intricate surrounding steel lattice. The steel frame was initially devised to conceal the structural supports for an ambitious retractable roof. Twenty-four trussed columns, each weighing 1,000 tons, were planned to encase the bowl. Although the crisscrossing exterior appeared disordered, the two halves of the arena were designed to be nearly symmetrical.