奥运给北京树起新地标_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

奥运给北京树起新地标

With its Herculean pre-Olympics construction push, Beijing has in just a few years transformed itself from a city of drab concrete superstructures to a magnet for innovative and ambitious architecture. Visitors to the Games will, like tourists on safari, want to bag the city's Big Five -- high-profile buildings that already are considered icons of China's new architecture. There is the National Stadium, aka 'the Bird's Nest,' whose design is meant to evoke the cracked glaze on ancient porcelain, and the Water Cube, the ocean-blue Olympic aquatics center with a surface of plastic cushions, like a sheet of bubbles. The CCTV Tower, with its twisted-doughnut profile, has redefined the word 'skyscraper.' The National Center for Performing Arts is like a titanium-clad flying saucer, and there's the vast sweep of Beijing Airport's new Terminal Three.

But several lower-profile works add to Beijing's new aesthetic, including a giant video installation on the side of a restaurant and a hotel clad in metal lattice. Beijing also is constructing, in Chaoyang Park, the world's biggest Ferris wheel.

For centuries, the golden roof and red walls of the emperor's palace and the narrow gray 'hutong' alleyways between courtyard homes defined Beijing. Starting in the 1950s, China's communist rulers remade the downtown, with massive, Stalinist edifices like the Great Hall of the People and acres of prefabricated concrete apartment blocks. Economic opening in the 1980s brought a new building boom, but not much in the way of new taste. Beijing's architects, determined to maintain a Chinese touch, capped new towers with traditional-looking structures that seemed blown there by a tornado.