Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1. Bird's Nest, Water Cube. Photo by A. Alerigi, Creative Commons License
naturalism to Eastern cultures).
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h e second is about the relationship
between this question of openness and the ethics of working with a politi-
cally authoritarian regime.
In response to the U.S. fi lm director Steven Spielberg's pulling out as
artistic advisor to the Olympics to repudiate China's inaction on Darfur, the
Swiss architects of the Bird's Nest, Herzog and de Meuron, wrote that it was
in fact their
responsibility
to engage in the hope that their stadium might
embody and even perhaps promote the idea of freedom. For instance, the
design is such that visitors can choose their own random paths. According to
de Meuron, “We wanted to do something not hierarchical, to make not a big
gesture as you'd expect in a political system like that but [something that for]
100,000 people [is still] on a human scale, without being oppressive. It's
