Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
coverage of the Olympics focused on the extreme air pollution produced by
Beijing's factories, construction sites, and motor vehicles.
Ostensibly a story about the health of high-performance athletes, the
unmistakable eff ect of the drumbeat of “Chinese smog” reports was to cor-
relate Chinese geopolitical threats with environmental threats. When the
world-record holder in the marathon, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia,
declined to compete in the Olympic marathon in order to preserve his lungs,
the news coverage was intense, as it was when the U.S. bicycling team
arrived in the Beijing airport wearing black masks designed to fi lter out par-
ticulates they claimed might aff ect their performance. During the Olympics
themselves, various Western media outlets made coverage of the atmosphere
a major part of their narrative line about the Beijing games. h e Associated
Press set up an air monitoring station on the Olympic Green. Media web-
pages sported widgets that kept a running record of air quality—a new
stream of information incongruously positioned alongside the familiar
stock, bond, and commodity tickers.
To counter the well-documented problem of Beijing's atrocious air pol-
lution, the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube built for the 2008 Beijing Olym-
pics both use “nature” as a model for balance, “harmony,” and functionality
(see fi gure 1). Both were also engineered by Arup, the fi rm behind Dongtan.
Analyzing the elements of eco-desire embodied by the Bird's Nest raises
similar intriguing questions about the relationship between architecture
and politics. h e fi rst is the central meaning of the organic and the natural.
Patterned after traditional Chinese ceramics, the building is meant to evoke,
according to its designers, a “porous . . . and a collective building, a public
vessel.”
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h e design serves as a sort of architectural preemption of criticisms
from Western observers primed to draw conclusions about China's auto-
cratic government from its Olympic façades. h e stadium casts an ironic
glance in the direction of the West's habitual reference to the organic as the
touchstone of design (and also to the orientalizing habit of ascribing naive
