National Aquatics Center (commonly known as Water Cube), which is located in Beijing Olympic Park, is one of the landmark buildings for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The design scheme for Bird’s Nest is selected from the global design competition. Along with the National Stadium (common known as Bird’s Nest), the two landmark buildings are located in the both sides of North end for central axis of Beijing City, jointly forming a relatively complete image historical and cultural city for Beijing. After ending of APEC in 2014, Water Cube has reopened to the public since Nov. 22, 2014 with unchanged ticket price of 30 RMB. After dismantling the fences in North and South Plaza, fountains and water curtains constructed during APEC have reopened to the public again. However, the Water World will not open until the mid or late December.

The planned urban construction land of National Aquatics Center is about 62,950 sqm, with a total floor area of 65,000 to 80,000 sqm, including the underground building area that shall not be less than 15,000 sqm. What’s more, the length, width and height shall be 177 m x 177 m x 30 m.

Seating capacity: 4,000 permanent seats, 2,000 removable seats and 11,000 temporary seats.

Construction cost: about 1.02 billion RMB (including 850 million RMB for donations from all sections of society).

Project owner: Beijing State Capital Managing Co. , Ltd

Designed by: CSCEC Design Consortium, Australian PTW Architectural Design Firms, ARUP international engineering group

The design firm for building acoustics: Department of Architecture Acoustic & Interior Design affiliated to THUPDI.

Construction company: China Construction First Building (Group) Corporation Limited

The whole building of Water Cube is consisted of over 3,000 air pillow with varying sizes and shapes, covering an area of 100,000 sqm, which can be rated as the top of the world. All the outer surface have adopted the membrane structures except the ground. The air pillows that are installed successfully will be inflated with air by gas charging pipelines prefabricated on the steel frames, forming various “Bubbles”. The smart surveillance for whole process shall be controlled by computers, maintaining the best status of “Bubbles” based on air pressure, illumination and other conditions.

The roof covering and wall structure is a new “polyhedron spatial frame” that is new to the world. The shape of the whole building structure is cube, and the plan view size is 176.5389 m×176.5389 m while the height of steel structure is about 30.5876 m. Due to the concept of “crystalline lens” that needs to be reflected by steel structure bars, the arrangement for bars are quite irregular with varying bar length. Furthermore, the random distribution of three-dimensional spacial nodes brings huge difficulties for fabrication and on-site assembly. The project won Luban Award in 2008.