The Water Cube
Comments: 10
This is quite incredible. I really hope this gets built. Arup has a beautiful animated rendering of the aquatic centre they’re planning to build for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It’s like the Tokyo Prada building for swimmers.
It’s a fantastically simple concept: take a pool, lift the volume of water out of the ground, enlarge it, and figure out a way to build it out of ‘bubbles.’ It’s all going to be in the execution — the translucency and colour of those tiles (or whatever they are) is the make or break proposition.
Thanks to Lil for the link.
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Posted to Architecture • 2004.09.03 (Fri) • 23:42
Comments
Posted by Dave2 2004.09.04, 01:09
I was a bit confused reading your post, because it was my understanding that this was the final choice for the design, and construction started last year? When I go to the project home page at ARUP (http://www.arup.com/project.cfm?pageid=1250) it seems to confirm this. Has something gone wrong?
Posted by Tim Bray 2004.09.04, 01:35
Isn’t it, er, a little Borg-cube Leni-Riefenstahl Dear-Leader, FASCIST in its feel? Particularly the vast windswept plazas outside studded with the purest gigantically-scaled a-human geometries, traversed by automata walking in lockstep? No decadent hot-dog stands contemplated one gathers. Just a little?
Posted by indieb0i 2004.09.04, 06:02
Very cool looking, but some of the video was confusing - including the aforementioned suit-clad automata goose-stepping outside. Like what’s with all of the circles outside - is that some strange drainaged system? Or maybe a way to flood an outside pool? And didn’t that diver look a little chunky?
Posted by Kristen 2004.09.04, 08:06
It’s a beautiful design. I gather that it will be opened to the public after the Olympics—I want to go swim there! Beijing is a short flight from Tokyo…
Posted by Temporary Tattoos 2004.09.04, 08:29
Beautiful design! I had some problems viewing the video, but this is probably because of my internet connection. Greetings from Germany Sandra
Posted by Paul 2004.09.04, 09:31
I was going to post a cheeky comment asking if a cube isn’t supposed to have six square sides. I checked a few dictionaries and they confirmed this, but I did find a definition on dictionary.com that allowed “six square or rectangular sides.”
Anyone care to comment on this? Nifty design, btw.
Posted by Mary Beth 2004.09.05, 12:48
Loved the animation. I thought they were tying in the circular shapes to the ripples from the rain or water drops, just as they tied the shapes of the walls to the bubbles or foam from the diver.
I will look forward to seeing it, since now I’m wondering if the dive platform towers are watery as well.
Posted by Rob Mientjes 2004.09.08, 16:23
Tim makes a good point (though this is not the place to discuss it). It has a bit of a propaganda tast, which is not strange, but indeed there. I got your point when you referred to Leni Riefenstahl, I have seen those movies (actually wrote a small essay on it, too). But we mustn’t forget this is China, they still are like that. However, it’s inappropriate.
Posted by Kristen 2004.09.10, 06:02
They’re scaling it back due to budget concerns.
Posted by chris 2007.01.24, 08:02
hey , check it out on flickr, it is actually built now
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=watercube
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