Critial Olympianism

[Image via SCOTT BURNHAM.]

SCOTT BURNHAM has a realy good post about the Beijing Stadium. He contends that the now ubiquitous “Bird’s Nest” shows a striking similarities to the improvised safety screening that Chinese migrant workers erect in buildings. This woven mesh of slates IS eerily similar to the form of the outer skin on Herzog & de Meuron’s Stadium.

Personally I find this to be a wonderful thing, with just one caveat. This is a great example of critical regionalism. An architect is taking a native form and filtering contemporary design through it. The mesh could easily have been some less derivative form, but through the interpretation of the wooden slats it becomes essentially Chinese. The big warning I have here is that this is critical regionalism because the artistic direction for the Stadium comes from someone who is OF this culture, unlike the architects who are outsiders.