The National Stadium (Bird's Nest) (Photo credit: Xinhuanet)
(BEIJING, April 21) -- "I'm more than happy to see the 'Bird's Nest' being used and lauded as a finished work now," said Li Xinggang, chief architect of the National Stadium for the Beijing Olympic Games, but added, "We must seize the last chance to make it perfect before its delivery following another pre-Games event in May."
Li comments, reported by the Shanghai Morning Post, came after the stadium, commonly known as "The Bird's Nest" because of its unique shape, debuted at the 2008 IAAF Race Walking Challenge on April 18 and 19. Li was at the stadium through the entire event to inspect the details of the Stadium's design and gauge spectators' reactions.
"The competitions served as a pre-Games event for us as designers as well," he said. "We did find some minor problems. For instance, we designed duo doors for the washrooms. Users were meant to enter and exit from different doors, but Chinese users are not accustomed to this and they just turned back and exited from the same door. Now we have to rethink the design: do we revise it and yield to conventional practice or insist on our own design and ask users to learn a new way?"
According to Li, perfecting a structure like this is about balancing the nature of the design itself with the perspective and personality of the structure's user.
He recalls the debates he had with architects at the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron in the early stages of the design. One idea was for the stadium to be a flat project with a hole atop. The Swiss side liked the idea, but Li was straightforward in his objection. "It'll look like a toilet seat in the eyes of Chinese people," he told them, and cautioned that the design would be rejected. Finally, the Swiss specialists yielded to their then 35-year-old Chinese colleague, deferring to his understanding of Chinese culture.
Li Xinggang, chief architect of the "Bird's Nest" (file photo)
"It's lucky that our dialogue was not "west versus east" or "traditional versus modern" but instead we had the same goal: to work together to create something that had modern flavor as well as conformity with traditional Chinese cultural aesthetic norms," Li said.
Li is now 39; the stadium has come a long way since those early discussions. Groundbreaking took place December 2003; the original roof design was omitted as a cost saving measure in August 2004; the working design was delivered in June 2005; the building's steel structures were connected and the supporting structures pulled away in the summer of 2006; and this month, the stadium made its official debut. .
Though he is just one part of a team, as chief architect Li has now become famous. But he remains modest. "Architecture is a profession for elderly people, because it needs experience. A man of my age is not matured yet," he said, "I need to learn, understand and grow to seize new opportunities and create new works for my country."
