Delivering the Beijing National Aquatics Center

摘要

The Beijing National Aquatics Center was one of the two main venues for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (Chen et al, 2008; Yuan et al, 2008) (Figure 1). By adopting a completely novel structural form and innovative building materials it broke the mould of traditional steel and concrete building design.Details of the venue are listed in Table 1 and the layout is shown in Figure 2. It was the first time Lord Kelvin's foam bubble theory was applied in architecture and is also the world's largest public building wholly enclosed by an ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) air-filled membrane (Yuan et al, 2008).