Soap bubbles seem fragile - they float on air and pop on contact - but their structures can be superstrong, relatively speaking. Of course, the Australian and Chinese firms putting up the bubble-inspired National Swimming Center in Beijing are using steel and a fluorocarbon-based polymer instead of soap. When it’s finished, in time for the 2008 Olympics, the 337,000-square-foot Watercube (as the locals call it) will have an airy, almost transparent frame, and it’ll use less raw material than if it were built with a traditional skeleton. The look, more foam than dome, is the result of innovative construction: four edges, three faces, and three intersecting nodes repeated 40,000 times. "We no longer need to be rectangular," says Tristram Carfrae, the chief engineer for the initial phase of the project. "The biggest move in structural engineering will be borrowing ideas from nature."
- Adam McCulloch
credit PTW Architects/CCDI/ARUP
A model of the Olympic swim center’s exterior panels.
credit PTW Architects/CCDI/ARUP
An artist’s rendition of the finished building.
credit PTW Architects/CCDI/ARUP
Olympic swim center segments under construction.
credit PTW Architects/CCDI/ARUP
Olympic swim center segments under construction.
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