Life After the Games
Beijing’s venues built with an eye on the future.
Event Description
Now nestling among Beijing’s soot-stained apartment blocks and courtyards from a bygone era are various extra-terrestrial structures; glass eggs, bubble-clad cubes and glittering, impossibly-angled skyscrapers pay testament to China’s economic good health. Eyesores or eye-catching, these buildings embody the city’s fervent desire to showcase its high-tech status.
Image: Beijing’s CCTV Tower takes shape
Source: Daniel Allen
The pièce de résistance of Beijing’s shiny new Olympic venues is the Swiss-designed National Stadium. The structure, due to be completed early next year, is popularly referred to as the Bird’s Nest, with a protective meshwork of twig-like girders encircling a pitch and track. It will apparently be blessed with all kinds of positive chi because bird’s nest soup is a Chinese delicacy, eaten only on special occasions (whether the architects in Basel had bird saliva on their minds at the concept stage is another matter).
Image: National Stadium (Bird’s Nest)
Source: China Daily
Estimates of the total cost of China’s 2008 Olympic venues run as high as $6 billion. This rather large sum has invoked the dismay and ire of many Chinese, and led to accusations that Beijing is creating a series of monumentally expensive white elephants which nobody will want to ride after the Games are over. Anyone who has read anything about London’s £800 million Millennium Dome may appreciate these sentiments.
Image: Chaoyang Park’s Beijing Wheel
Source: The Great Wheel Corporation
For the 2004 Games in Greece, Athens spent more than $3 billion constructing 36 venues, some of which were ready only days before they hosted Olympic events. Now almost all of them lie derelict and empty, and even the Greek government has conceded a lack of planning. “We did not have a reliable post-Olympics plan in Greece. Many venues were designed without their post-Olympic use in mind,” Fani Petralia, Greece’s top Olympic official, has been quoted as saying.
Commenting on Beijing’s desire to see money well spent on Olympic venues, Sun Weide, Deputy Director of Media and Communications at the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games (BOCOG), says, “China’s Olympic venues will all be put to good use after the Games are over. The athletes’ village will become a high-end apartment development, the Olympic Park will continue to function as Beijing’s “green lung”, and the various stadia will be transformed into sports centers, public leisure facilities and exhibition halls.”
Image: Beijing’s Olympic Park
Source: China Daily
Luckily it seems that Beijing has learned from Athens’ mistakes, and venue construction has been largely trouble-free. In fact, so efficient have China’s builders been that the International Olympic Committee had to step in two years ago to apply the brakes. In a country notorious for its over-budget and woefully delayed civil engineering projects, it will be interesting to see how London fares in comparison when preparing for 2012.