North American Premiere

BIRD’S NEST isn’t just the name of China’s Olympic Stadium. It also describes the complex, multilayered international engagement required to design and build the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.

Architecture is a discourse between art and practicality. How we describe our buildings is how we describe ourselves:  reflective, forward-thinking, risk-taking, complex yet stable, traditional yet practical, and welcoming. All of these words describe the brilliant achievement by renowned Swiss architects Pierre Herzog and Jacques de Meuron, and the wide cast of Chinese officials, contractors and cultural interpreters with whom they collaborated and negotiated to realize their vision. Their goal was to create a massive 91,000-seat stadium in the heart of Beijing that would be a new kind of public space—“anti-monumental, a building for the people”—that would endure long after the Olympic torch is extinguished. The Chinese people nicknamed the stadium “Bird’s Nest” early on; by naming it, they adopted it as their own.

Directors Christoph Schaub and Michael Schindhelm uncover the expectations and processes at work, and reveal the inevitable gaps in communication and logistics that threaten the project along the way. The architects dig deeply into the culture, collaborating with celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to capture the traditional forms and contemporary desires to be reflected in the stadium.

The film ends with a complex layering of images that mimics the layered lines of a bird’s nest: Chinese couples dancing, the stadium, and the forest and trees that were part of its inspiration.

—Patricia Finneran