Beijing National Stadium and the Water Cube, Olympic Green

The Beijing National Stadium, designed by the engineers at Arup along with Herzog & De Meuron architects and China Architecture Design & Research Group, has a capacity of 91,000 seats and will host the opening and closing ceremonies of this summer’s Olympic Games, as well as the track and field athletic events. The stadium’s vast scale and dramatic form has created another new icon for China and Beijing alongside the ‘Water Cube’, the aquatic center for the Games, also designed by Arup.

The intricately arranged steel roof structure has earned the stadium the nickname of ‘The Bird’s Nest’. J Parrish, a leader of Arup’s specialist sports design practice explains, “We designed the stadium inside out. The seating bowl was designed first as our priority was to ensure that 91,000 spectators will be as close as possible to the action with clear sight lines. The design also had to accommodate 11,000 temporary seats for the Games.”

“The facade was then designed to wrap around the seating. Although the pattern of the steel structure might appear random, it follows a complex set of rules from which we defined the geometry. Without this the stadium would have been impossible to build. The design will leave spectators wondering which aspects of the structure are functional and which have been included for appearance alone.”

The National Aquatics Centre, known as ‘The Water Cube’, will be one of the most dramatic and exciting venues to feature sporting events for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The design of the Water Cube is derived from theoretical physics, and the steel frame that encompasses this aquatic center is based on what is known as the Weaire-Phelan structure, which describes the most efficient way to divide space. This is in fact the same way that bubbles form in foam.

Whereas soap bubbles can be divided into two shapes - three quarters of the cells have 14 sides and the remainder has twelve - the engineering solution to make the Water Cube a reality requires over a hundred different ones. However, in spite of their seeming randomness, bubbles always touch each other with a regular geometry and it is this simple fact that makes the design feasible.

A steel frame outlines all of the edges where three bubbles meet: the result is a structure that is so strong that it would still keep its shape if it were turned on its side. This robustness makes the design ideal for managing the seismic conditions in Beijing.

Steve Burrows is the Building Engineering Group Leader for the San Francisco office of Arup. He was previously in the Manchester UK Office of Arup where he was involved in the Beijing National Stadium Project.