But Ai has never set foot inside the finished building. The official audio tour describes the stadium in these symbolic terms: "The Bird's Nest, as a symbol of the rise of the Chinese nation, will follow the nation's footsteps in its rise to glory."īut the Chinese artist who helped conceive of the Bird's Nest now says he regrets having designed such a monument to China's Communist leaders.Īi Weiwei designed the stadium, together with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. How can you not feel proud?" he asks, beaming from ear to ear. "I'm proud that China has this great architecture, that it can build such a great world monument. "Regardless of whether you're talking about Beijingers or Chinese people, we needed a landmark venue, a place whose image is beautiful."Ĭhinese tourist Wang Xiaoyu feels the same way, as he stands inside the Bird's Nest for the first time. But in order to maintain our venue's image, we must host them," Yang says. Some international competitions clearly lose lots of money. "Without that money, we couldn't hold important sports events. Yang says the Water Cube narrowly broke even last year, though it required $1.5 million in government subsidies. "Although we put in a lot of effort, the trend of diminishing numbers can't be reversed," he says. But according to the state-run Global Times, Yang says the Water Cube attracted nearly 2.1 million visitors in 2011, 30 percent fewer compared with the year before.
He angrily denies state-run media reports that the facility lost $1.5 million last year. The Water Cube has found an Olympic afterlife, with some of the building converted to a water park. When he called Beijing's Olympic venues "beautiful" and "unprecedented," current IOC President Jacques Rogge can hardly have known he would be immortalized in wax inside one of those venues, always photo-ready, should the visitor be willing to part with $1.50 for the privilege. There's even a small waxworks museum, exhibiting figurines of all the past and present presidents of the International Olympic Committee. Now, tourists wobble around the same track on Segways, which they hire for just over $20 for 15 minutes. It's a far cry from the world record set by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who set the mark for the 100 meters and the 200 meters in the packed Bird's Nest. Since the Olympics, a number of tactics have been tried: The construction of man-made ski slopes turned it temporarily into a winter wonderland, and tightrope walker Adili Wuxor spent two months living suspended on a tightrope above the Bird's Nest trying to set a new world record.
The problem is how to fill the empty expanse of seats the stadium is designed to house 91,000 spectators.
A woman goes snow-tubing in January 2010 inside the Bird's Nest, which was transformed temporarily into a winter theme park.