For the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Australian architectural office
PTW designed the Watercube, the National Swimming Centre.
Renderings from PTW Architects
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The building is situated next to the Olympic Stadium of the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Next to the ‘nest’ the swimming pool features an iconography of bubbles.
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A (soap)bubble is structurally perfect, being a sphere that dynamically adjusts its edge to accommodate what loads are applied to it where. Bubbles have been an inspiration for architects like Buckminster Fuller and in his wake architects like Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw. In this building the iconography of the bubble is used in a new way - instead of making an ‘ideal’ sphere with the bubbles PTW uses them to make a pragmatic box – an reflection upon the traditional Chinese house style.
Rendering from PTW Architects
Republished as an entry on eikongraphia.com
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The structure will have a capacity of 17,000 during the games that will be reduced to 6,000 afterwards. It also has a total land surface of 65,000 square metres and will cover a total of 7.8 acres.
Unlike traditional stadium structures with gigantic columns, beams, cables and backspans, to which a facade system is applied, in the watercube design the architectural space, structure and facade are one and the same element. According to design requirements, all the steel structures of the center should be covered by the cushions, made of a modified co-polymer called ethylene-tetra-fluoro-ethylene, or ETFE. The watercube comprises over 100,000sqm of ETFE foils, making it the single largest, most complicated and most comprehensive ETFE structure in the world to date. The ETFE cladding allows more light and heat penetration than traditional glass, resulting in a 30% decrease in energy costs. Additionally, the pool water itself will be heated in part by the sun, thus decreasing cost associated with pool heating. The structural design will also use considerably less steel and other materials than a more traditional structure of this size would.
Renderings from PTW Architects
Republished as an entry on eikongraphia.com
http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=63
info taken from http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=6 and PTW official website
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