Wish I Lived In Beijing!

I saw the Water Cube in the book and I instantly fell in love with it.  When I look at structures like the Water Cube or the Bird’s Nest stadium or the Buckminster Fuller U.S. Pavilion in Canada, I cannot help but wish that we were able to walk down the street here in our town s and just see buildings like that all over.

These buildings are the epitome of style.  Just look at the Water Cube.  With the translucent outer walls shaped sort of like cells or water droplets, it gives you a clear idea of exactly what the building is holding, in a new and classy way.  Looking from below, inside the Cube, all you see are “drops,” surrounding you, letting in the light and making it almost refract, giving the appearance that you are standing in the center of a water droplet.

Or look at the Bird’s Nest stadium almost right next door to the Water Cube.  Crazy, interlocking steel beams from every direction heading off into every other conceivable direction!  It’s lopsided and wacky, with a major hole directly over the middle of the field…  You might think “who in their right mind designs such an outlandish structure??” 

Well, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, from Switzerland, can take credit for the Nest, but its neighbor the Water Cube sprang from a co-op of Australian and Chinese engineers… I would call them geniuses!  By creating two utterly unique buildings for the Olympics, they have created a must-see block in Beijing, but also opened fun new avenues of design, where you can dream what you want, and create that dream!