Olympic Building: The Water Cube

Like the Bird's Nest, this is the product of an international design consortium: PTW Architects, CSCEC International Design and Arup.  (Loyal HAWTaction readers will recognize the Arup group from Tall Building: CCTV and TVCC Towers in Media Park.  Holy productive year, Arup!)  So, this consortium thought, like the Bird's Nest architects, that they had to bring something to the table that has never been seen before.  A narrow ceramic block wasn't going to do it. 

The design is just brilliant and obscure.  The inspiration?  A bunch of bubbles.  Yes, a bunch of bubbles.  Apparently, bubbles have a couple of ways they naturally arrange themselves, and each provides great stability.  The team started running with it.  How to make these bubbles?  Will it be as stable as expected?  Well, bring on the computers.  There was some analysis to be done.

So, the building became an boxy grid that's broken down into precise, irregularly shaped "chunks."  What to do now?  What to cover it with?  Well, they decided to go with a space-age material (literally) that has made an appearance in a few buildings already.  (The most famous of those now is Herzog and de Meuron's Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany.  The brilliance in Munich is that this stadium is shared by two teams and can be lit blue or red, depending on which team is hosting a game.)

This material is called ETFE, a translucent plastic.  It lets in more light and solar heat than glass, which heats the building and cuts energy costs by 30%.  Thirty percent!  The bubble-grid is wrapped in the ETFE (as you can see above.)  On the outside, though?  It wasn't a simple wrapping.  Because each of the "bubbles" was a unique shape, each ETFE covering had to be cut precisely, sewn into a pillow and inflated. 

Once they are set up, they can be lit by LEDs (light emitting diodes) that allow the bubbles to be colored whatever color God wants them to be.  Each of those pillows has a hose hooked into the back of it that maintains the pillow's pressure.  Each pillow, in fact, has sensors it uses to measure the pressure and turn on that hose if necessary.  Each pillow.  My lordie.

Here are some colors for you.

By the way, the building uses 10,000 square meters (~108,000 square foot) of this material.  My lordie.  Even though the ETFE is 0.02 centimeters thick (0.008 inches), it can hold up to 300 times its weight. Because it's lighter and stronger than glass, it can span greater distances without a buttress.  It is recyclable.  RECYCLABLE!  Oh, and it supposedly costs 70 percent less to install than glass.  This ETFE might be the new steel, cotton, brick and nylon.  Check it.

So, that's the structure of the stadium.  Inside, it's a 17,000-seat, beautiful swimming complex that will host swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and water-polo final.  After the Olympics, they'll pull 11,000 seats out of there, leaving 6,000.  It'll be a sports complex for Beijing after the Olympics, and I could see myself doing a few laps in that pool.

The pool is a bit controversial because it's a meter deeper than most Olympic pools (3 meters deep versus 2).  What does that mean?  It means the water displaced by the swimmers has more room to travel before it comes back and impacts them.  Essentially, the swimmers will move faster.  More world records (which is extremely apparent two days in.)

Ground broke on this sucka in 2003 and it only took 5 years and $200 million to build.  (Really?  $200 million?  That's it?)  Here are some photos of the sassy interior.

I could do my ablutions there.

The ETFE is proving to be a bit tricky now because it's so thin, there are reports that Beijing's pollution is seeping into the building.  Oh, pollution, how you point out our flaws.

08-08-08.  The Olympics are here, and they are here in style.  HAWTaction [hot ak-shuhn].