Sacrilege

A confession: I don't actually like the two centrepiece arenas of Beijing's Olympics very much.

I like the concept of the Bird's Nest more than its execution. That intricate lattice design is pretty striking at a distance, but when you get up close, it starts looking kind of crappy.

Are those really solid steel girders? Perhaps my problem stems partly from an inability to comprehend or accept the massiveness of the construction: it doesn't seem plausible that that lattice can be made of solid steel, or that it can be in any significant way load-bearing rather than simply decorative. Perhaps it is - but it doesn't look like it! Couldn't they have chosen a finish that looked more robust, more metallic? These girders are a drab, pale grey colour, with a matt texture that looks oddly plasticky - just not impressive at all. It almost looks as if it is made out of Lego.

Well, except that it appears to be rusting already. I noticed quite a number of worrying reddish-brown streaks on the grey paint. Well, we did have a lot of rain over the past few months......

And as for the Water Cube..... well, it looks pretty at night when they have all those different coloured lights playing across it. But by day..... well, it's a very, very dull shape, not to say ugly. And, er, it looks as if it's made of plastic bags. Which it is. An ingenious construction technique, perhaps, but hardly beautiful. Up close you can enjoy some interesting details of the varied shapes and contours of the bubble-surface (as in this shot below; though, unfortunately, the light wasn't very good when I was there taking photographs); but from a distance, it looks like nothing very special at all. (And my arch-curmudgeon friend Big Frank objects noisily that it isn't even a cube. He made this point so often last week while he was staying with me that I began to wish the structure might suddenly rise hundreds of feet out of the ground on hydraulic jacks and reveal itself to be truly cubic after all, but..... alas, this never came to pass. Actually, I'm not even sure that the horizontal cross-section is a perfect square; isn't it a bit longer than it is wide??)