National Stadium

This guide to Beijing's National Stadium follows Ai Weiwei, the artist who helped design its tangled steel lattice with the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron and gave the building its nickname, the Bird's Nest. It traces the roughly five years and thousands of tons of Chinese steel that went into building it, and the political openness Ai hoped it represented. Listen for how that hope collided with the spring of 2008, as the Sichuan earthquake unfolded alongside the Olympic buildup.