Beijing Water Cube

610 Words3 Pages
Beijing National Aquatics Center The National Aquatics Center also known as Water Cube was the main aquatic center for the aquatic competitions at Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and is located at the center of Olympic Green Park. At the Summer Olympics was the venue for swimming, diving and synchronized swimming but after that the building was changed into a water park where can be found related water activities such as swimming, aquatic sports, fitness and recreation. The building was designed by the Australian architecture firm PTW Architects and they built it in collaboration with Arup international engineering group, CSCEC (China State Construction Engineering Corporation), and CCDI (China Construction Design International) of Shanghai. The PTW Architects team formed by John Bilmon, Mark Butler and Chris Bosse have won the competition with this innovating idea of combining the Chinese symbolic square and the natural organic soap bubbles. The steel structure frame is covered by the largest ETFE clad structure in the world with over 100.000 m2 of ETFE pillows that are only 0.2 mm in total thickness. The walls and ceiling are based on the Weaire - Phealan geometry, a structure devised from the natural formation of bubbles in soap lather. The Water Cube’s exterior skin is made out of 4000 ETFE irregular bubbles, some of them reaching 30 feet across with seven different sizes for the roof and fifteen for the walls. The Water Cube is designed to be a gigantic green building. In comparison with the traditional glass, ETFE allows much more light to enter, the heat penetration is bigger, and the lighting effect is the same, reducing the energy costs by 30%. They managed to cut the costs by using the ETFE instead of glass and by reducing the supporting steel structure considerably. One of the
Open Document