VIFF Review: Bird's Nest

Bird's Nest: Herzog and De Meuron in China
Granville 7 Theatre 1
Thursday, October 2 2008 7:15pm

The most iconic image of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was the remarkable National Stadium. The international competition to design the stadium was won by Swiss star architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. But winning the competition was only the beginning of a monumental task. This documentary is a fascinating look behind the scenes on a high visibility project, and what technical, financial, political, and cultural problems must be overcome.

Without the aid of knowledgeable collaborators Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and former Swiss ambassador to China and Chinese art patron Dr. Uli Sigg, Herzog and de Meuron's design concepts may have crashed into a cultural faux pas. A rival's losing design of a green glassed dome has a shape reminiscent of a green shelled tortoise. Apparently this has a cultural connotation of a cuckolded man.

The various Chinese officials involved with the project all have their own agendas which are not necessarily beneficial to the successful completion of the stadium. A surprising development is the reduction in budget after construction is underway. This causes the original retractable roof to be abandoned, and the stadium to be left open.

Herzog and de Meuron have a very humanistic philosophy to architecture. Starting without preconceived notions, they learn as much as possible about local conditions including site, purpose and cultural values. They try to create not a monument but an anti-monument. Despite its impressive scale they try to incorporate elements to make the stadium human scaled. It is their hope that it will become a sort of public sculptural space after the Olympics much as the Eiffel Tower became a public sculpture one could visit. Whether this happens is out of their hands.

The stadium is not their only project in China. Their town plan design for a new neighbourhood of the small city of Jinhua has run into a bureacratic wall and is stalled in the planning stage. For ordinary Chinese like Fang—a young man living in the nearby village of Yiwu and contemplating a move to Jinhua—this represents a speed bump in the exodus to the city. From the village and the hutong to the city and the high rise, architects like Herzog and de Meuron have an influential role in the transformation of China.