Scott Burnham Uncovers the Bird Nest’s Origins

With all this talk about Ai Weiwei being angry at the Beijing Olympics and NBC completely ignoring the names of who built all of these stadiums, writer Scott Burnham comes at the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium from a wholly unique angle in his piece explaining his thoughts that the inspiration for the stadium came to Herzog & de Meuron and Weiwei by way of the very Chinese migrant workers who helped build the flashy new Beijing that surrounds it. His rationale comes from witnessing the methods used by said workers for construction completely unsafe safety precautions in yet-to-be windowed hi-rise buildings: simple pieces of wood nailed one on top of the other in a woven pattern in order to help avoid falling out. Once Burnham calls it out and includes a few photographs, it’s nearly impossible not to see how similar it looks to the National Stadium. And surely the team at Herzog & de Meuron must have seen plenty of this on their trips to China, and Weiwei must have been constantly surrounded by it during the last few years of Beijing’s massive rebuilding. It’s an interesting piece, going back to the point of inspiration and attempting to give proper credit where credit is due.

As an aside, why not look back to early June when we were talking about what the Bird’s Nest is made of and how exactly it was built.

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