Tag: 05.24.03

The model for Herzog and de Meuron’s recently announced stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a crossover from structure to poetry, writes Giles Worsley. “When built, it will rise 67 metres in the heart of the city and hold 100,000 spectators. The model captures the sense of ambiguity that increasingly surrounds the architects’ buildings, particularly where façade and structure meet. The Basel-based firm that designed Tate Modern has used the idea of a nest of twigs to give external form to the building, a lattice of massive concrete beams, through which spectators penetrate to the heart of the building – the stands.”

St. Petersburg is, “without doubt, one of the world’s most exquisite cities. Yes, it is flanked by meretricious modern design, encircled by brutal Soviet-era, high-rise apartment blocks and smells of grinding poverty. Its water is often unsafe to drink, its crowded trolley-buses are rusting away and its pavements are forced to tackle the shifts of fetid marshland below them. But, when you walk along Nevsky Prospect or catch sight of any of the city’s brightly coloured, set-piece buildings, when you spy the golden spires of fairy-tale fortresses and heavenly churches or the seemingly infinite march of classical arcades, their vaults lit by the sun sparkling from the Dutch and Venetian-style canals, you feel that this is paradise, not urban purgatory.”