KEY POINTS:
THE OLYMPIC STADIUM
Herzog & de Meuron's awe-inspiring 91,000-seat stadium, known, because of its latticed surface, as the Bird's Nest, is the defining landmark, not just of the Olympics, but of the new China, the emergent superpower that is using the games to mark its transformation from
Marxist-Leninist backwater to glittering metropolis. Its steel structure is of a complexity that tested Chinese technology and manufacturing to its limits. As a monument it has a richness and depth that takes it beyond the simplistic cult of the icon. Herzog & de Meuron have done nothing less than reinvent the athletic stadium. Instead of an isolated object, the Bird's Nest is designed to create public spaces. As the most conspicuous of Beijing's new landmarks, it has also been criticised by Chinese architects angered by their exclusion from the projects.
AQUATIC CENTRE
The Olympic pool is sheathed in a huge plastic skin, patterned on the structure like a soap bubble. Designed by the Australian architects PTW, it looks best at night, glowing translucent blue, a quieter counterpart to the structural flamboyance of the stadium on the other side of the Olympic green.
THE GRAND NATIONAL THEATRE
Within sight of the courtyards of the Forbidden City, and on the edge of Tiananmen Square, the Grand National Theatre is perhaps the most questionable of the city's new structures. Designed by Paul Andreu, the architect for Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, it has a ruthless symmetry. Its titanium and glass shell is sunk into the middle of a lake that acts like a moat, the most anti-urban gesture imaginable.
BEIJING AIRPORT
Beijing's new terminal is essentially a new airport. Cross the threshold and you are dazzled by what feels like a landscape rather than an interior. A sparse collection of giant columns hold up its delicate, refined roof. Norman Foster has more experience than most of designing airports. Stansted, Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok and now Beijing have moved a step further in perfecting lightweight structures. Beijing's sweeping roof has been peeled open to allow in flashes of daylight while glass walls show the ranks of jumbos outside.
CHINA CENTRAL TELEVISION / MANDARIN HOTEL
The CCTV towers will not be ready for the Olympics. Nor, despite earlier claims to the contrary, will the Mandarin Hotel adjoining it. Yet the complex is already one of the city's most conspicuous new structures. Both are designed by Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture. They have produced the most aggressive, and determinedly transgressive, landmark for Beijing. The earthquake-defying form - and huge structural overhangs which leave tens of thousands of square feet of office space supported, apparently, by nothing - look bizarre even in a city in which anything is possible.
To deal with all those extreme cantilevers in an earthquake zone takes a great deal of structural skill, here provided by Arup engineers. It also needs a fair bit of steel, which is applied, apparently at random in strange clusters, some stopping mid-flight, others going off at odd angles, creating the impression of a darned sock, or structural Band-Aid, applied retrospectively to patch up the cracks.
JIANWAI SOHO
Working for Soho China, run by Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the most innovative developers in Beijing, the Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto has created a huge complex of flats, shops and cafes. There are 20 towers, containing 650,300sq m of space, arranged in a careful grid.
CHINA WORLD TRADE CENTRE 3
Beijing's tallest tower, the China World Trade Centre 3, is the third instalment in a development that has become the heart of the city's business district, a thicket of towers that sprouted between the first crop of international hotels and the diplomatic enclave.
As contemporary high-rises go, at only 330m, it is relatively modest. Shanghai's World Financial Centre is half as high again and the Burj al Arab tower in Dubai will be more than 600m, but Beijing knows how to impress with more than sheer size.
Designed by the American firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill it's a skyscraper that stands out for its quiet reticence.
The tower, with its gently tapered form and pleated metal and glass skin, is an elegantly cut Brooks Brothers suit, with curious echoes in its gothic base of Minoru Yamasaki's Twin Towers, destroyed in the September 11 attacks in New York.
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