Olympic instability

[Image: Ben Lepley].

These construction photos of Herzog & de Meuron's new Beijing National Stadium – aka the 2008 Olympic birdsnest – were pointed out to me the other day; they combine the skewed angles and weird lighting of German Expressionist films with the stitched-together, black voided frame that I've commented on before.
So I decided to post them.

[Image: Ben Lepley].

At times, the building appears to be nothing but a monumental shadow-casting device, bent over itself and I-beamed back together again in an elaborate cage around the flames of arc-welding machines.

[Image: Ben Lepley].

Other times, it looks like some lost Jovian city from a deleted scene of 2001.

[Image: Ben Lepley].

The structure itself – though I know this is very old news for just about everyone who will visit this site – has been engineered by Arup; they write: "The structure is an interwoven series of beams giving an impression of weightlessness. Careful material selection also plays a part in the illusion."
Further, Arup suggests: "If you imagine overlapping lollypop sticks so that they interlock to form a star shape, then you get the idea for how we started to think about the venue."
Of course, this is in Beijing, "the city that ate the world." Last year, Deyan Sudjic pointed out that, "[b]y some estimates, half the world's annual production of concrete and one-third of its steel output is being consumed by China's construction boom." This boom has a noticeably Babelian overtone to it: "Cars move around disconnected clumps of newly completed towers," and "entire new districts appear arbitrarily as if from nowhere."

A city that, until 1990, had no central business district, and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in turn, are now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller, slicker towers, the product of the international caravan of architectural gunslingers that has arrived in town to take part in this construction free-fire zone.

Amidst all these, then, will be the Olympic Stadium, whose "circular shape has emerged from the ground, giving it the look of a ruined colosseum."
More construction photos available at Archinect.

(Thanks, Cara!)