Bird's Nest (National Stadium)

The main stadium of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, designed by Herzog and de Meuron and completed in 2008. The structure — an intricate lattice of curved steel beams with no visible exterior supports — is one of the most distinctive pieces of contemporary architecture anywhere in the world. It hosted the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics events of the 2008 Summer Games, and again for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Tours of the interior are available; the stadium is also used for concerts and occasional sports events. The adjacent Water Cube (National Aquatics Centre), now converted to an indoor water park, is worth seeing alongside it. The Olympic Green area is in northeast Beijing; a separate trip from the main sights of the old city.

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The stadium's woven steel lattice — the visual metaphor of a bird's nest — was designed by the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron in collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who later disowned the project and called it a "fake smile" serving propaganda purposes. The building itself is an undeniably remarkable piece of engineering, 91,000 tonnes of steel wrapped around 91,000 seats.

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