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The White Hat Guide to The Water Cube, Beijing

When the City of Beijing was selected to hold the 2008 Olympic Games they chose to hold an international design competition for the major sporting stadiums. Appropriately enough the competition required that there be important Chinese involvement in any of the submitted entries.

A number of international submissions were received for the Beijing National Aquatic Centre and in the end the one chosen by the panel was that submitted by a consortium consisting of the Australian PTW Architects, the Australian Arup engineers and the China Construction Design Institute. Because of its unique design and conception this building was to become known as 'The Water Cube'.

The Design

For many centuries, designers have been fascinated with what uniform shapes can be used to cover a flat surface. The simplest shape is the square such as used in a simple bathroom tile. Another familiar shape is the rectangle The advantage of having a standard shape (or maybe two or three) that tessellates (or forms a tiling pattern) is that they can be mass produced and you know you don't need to generate any extra fiddly bits to fill the gaps and it makes fro very efficient building.

Similarly when filling a three dimensional space, a cube works nicely as does a rectangular prism such as a brick. As a result many man-made structures are full of straight lines, squares, rectangles, cubes and other shapes that are rarely, if ever, found in nature. Yet nature manages to produce incredibly strong structures from seemingly random shapes. Thus if you are wanting to design a building that has a natural (as in 'nature) and organic feel it is well worth studying the structures that occur in nature.

A natural space-filling structure is that of foam and this had a particular affinity with the design of an aquatic centre. The possible structures of foam have preoccupied physicists for many years and in the late 19th century Lord Kelvin posed the problem of what constitutes the most 'efficient' shape of foam bubbles. "There - that should keep them bust for a century" he thought. Then in 1993 two Irish theoretical physicists, Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan, came up with the best answer to date. Having spent a lot of time in the spa studying foam - "You can't come in - we're working" - the architects decided to adopt the Weaire-Phelan foam structure as the basis for  The Water Cube. By slicing through this regular structure at an angle, an organic, seemingly-random cross-section was created.

The Build

Despite the highly complex and intricate design featuring 22,000 steel beams and 4,000 bubbles, the build was completed in seven months. This was possible because, among other things:

• Because of its international experience, Arup was able to call on 80 skilled engineers from across four countries and multiple disciplines to contribute to the project.
• The design, although appearing complex and random from the outside, is based on a series of uniformly shaped bubbles thus allowing efficient repetitive production techniques.

Environmentally Sustainable Design Features

As with many contemporary buildings with significant Australian design content, environmental sustainably features are built in rather than 'tacked on'.

• The building is designed like a giant greenhouse. The transparent panels transmit a large amount of the natural daylight and the trapped heat is used for passive heating of the building and the water in the pool greatly reducing energy demands. Patterning on the 'bubbles' provide appropriate shading and during summer the trapped heat is ventilated.
• Beijing has a low rainfall and water from the large roof is collected, stored and treated to make it suitable for hot water services. Grey water from showers, hand basins and pool backwash is recycled fro such purposes as flushing toilets and irrigation.
• The polymer (ETFE) used for the surface of the bubbles is extremely light and thin thus significantly reducing the quantity of load bearing materials (which usually contain a large amount of 'embedded energy') which needed to be used.
• The strong but very light structure is ideally suited to the local seismic conditions.
• Like The Birds Nest Stadium, The Water Cube has been designed so that it can be easily repurposed.

The Water Cube as an example of Australian / International Design

The Water Cube demonstrates a number of qualities that have become common in major Australian / International designs.

• An awareness of local culture (for instance the yin and yang of The Water Cube and the The Birds Nest Stadium - another structure calling on substantial Australian engineering expertise) while looking forwards rather than backwards.
• A strong emphasis on sustainability issues.
• A preoccupation with natural and environmental forms.
• A certain playfulness or irreverence underpinned by a solid understanding of the underpinning principles. In this case and understanding of theoretical physics, mathematics, engineering and architectural principles are all combined in a building with science concealing science, mathematics concealing mathematics and art concealing art.