Bird's Nest: Herzog & de Meuron in China

Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, friends since kindergarten, want to build the stadium for this summer's Olympics in Beijing. They do. So goes Bird's Nest, a facile, frustrating documentary about the project. The stadium itself is striking, a luminous steel membrane that may, as its designers hope, become an iconic, Eiffel Tower-like public space. But despite what seems to have been full access to the men and their collaborators, the filmmakers never reveal the principles or vision that led to the stadium's radical, bird's-nestlike design. Nor do they demonstrate fluency in architecture or Chinese history and politics. Chinese architect and artist Ai Weiwei, who worked with Herzog and de Meuron, has already distanced himself from the stadium, disgusted by his government's co-opting of it as a symbol of development. More of him and less of Herzog's jetlagged Zen — "Architecture is relatively impotent, but it does exist" — might have helped, but in structure and point of view, Bird's Nest is as chaotic as Herzog and de Meuron envisioned their stadium.