Bird's Nest - Beijing National Stadium

The Olympic Green, Beijing's newest urban parkland, is great for walking and sightseeing—it's full of Olympic-themed sculptures, art, and fun rest spots. To get to the Bird's Nest, walk north on Beichen Lu, and soon you'll see it on your right with the Water Cube on your left. Aside from these new architectural icons, the Green is home to a clutch of other Olympic legacy structures and considerable stretches of green (as you'd hope and expect) and walking paths.  

The Bird's Nest—officially known as Beijing National Stadium—is easily the best known of Beijing's Olympic structures, and as such, is the crown jewel of the Green. Herzog and deMeuron's architectural masterpiece, derived by an original concept by controversial artist Ai Weiwei, features monstrous steel elements weighing up to 350 tons a piece intertwined in such a fashion that this gargantuan structure actually looks quite delicate.

The building has received both praise and criticism for its unconventional and potentially risky design—over 70% of the building's weight hangs over the audience's head. It also received a dose of controversial coverage when Ai Weiwei, disgusted with government policies in the lead up to the Olympics, publicly disowned his own role in the building's design in protest. 

The Water Cube is now an aquatic center open to the public and worth a closeup look for its use of space-age construction materials and techniques. You'll also find on the Green the Beijing National Indoor Stadium, also known as "the Fan," which hosted most indoor floor events in 2008; the Olympic Green Convention Center; the Olympic Green Tennis Center; and the Beijing Olympic Village, where the Olympic athletes lived in 2008.