Olympic Sports Exposition & Exhibition Center Main Stadium
Petal-shaped stadium roof engineered to cut steel use by two-thirds, seating eighty thousand fans.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Olympic Sports Exposition & Exhibition Center Main Stadium in Hangzhou follows architect Jonathan Ward and his design team as they abandon the old build-test-discard method for a roof of twenty eight large petals and twenty seven small ones curving in two directions at once. It traces how running the whole roof as one live digital model let an engineering firm on the other side of the world edit the same file in real time, turning an impossible curved shape into a small family of modules crews could actually lift and bolt together by hand. Ground broke in December two thousand nine, and the guide follows the near-decade it took to see that design through construction.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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