In July 2001, Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, and it started gearing up immediately. Soon, its Olympic organizing committee chose Sasaki Associates, based in Boston and San Francisco, from 94 entries to design the Olympic Green, the main site for the games, five miles north of the Forbidden City. Sasaki saw its job as creating a framework not only for the Olympics but for integrating the 2,800-acre site with the city as a whole. The firm envisioned private, mixed-use developments lining the green on the east and west and establishing a strong relationship between the public and private realms. It also extended the city’s existing street grid onto the Olympic site, weaving together old and new. Sasaki’s design comprises three key elements: a Forest Park on the north; a diagonal Olympic Axis connecting existing sports facilities from the 1985 Asian Games to the new venues for the Olympics; and a Cultural Axis extending the ancient imperial route that runs north from Tiananmen Square through the Forbidden City. The Olympic Green encompasses about half of the 31 sporting venues to be used during the Games, but none sits directly on the Cultural Axis. As Dennis Pieprz, the president of Sasaki, explains: “We decided to put people at the center of the green, so we reserved the main axis for them and used the major iconic buildings to frame that public space.” Sasaki’s scheme places the Games’ two iconic buildings—the National Stadium and the National Swimming Center—on either side of the axis. A new subway line opens this summer with several stations along the Olympic Green. Although Sasaki wasn’t involved in the landscape architecture, a canal and a tree-lined esplanade that it designed in the shape of a dragon’s tail remains, says Pieprz, “symbolically linking the Forest Park, the central area, and the Asian Games site.”
Archery Field BlighVollerNield with China Construction Design International
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