MegaStructures - Season 5 Episode 4 Beijing Water Cube
Just in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, workers are feverishly putting the finishing touches on the National Aquatics Centre – the Beijing Water Cube. A stroke of design genius, this Olympic Megastructure is a steel honeycomb-like frame enclosed entirely by a unique skin, modelled after soap bubbles. Using 90 kilometres worth of steel in 22,000 beams following no conventional straight lines, the Beijing Water Cube must be topped with 100,000 square metres of bubbles. Looking for a truly unique covering, the design team focuses on ETFE – a light-weight plastic invented to protect spaceships from cosmic radiation. Among ETFE’s unique properties, dot patterns on its surface can trap solar energy in the winter and reflect solar energy in the summer, keeping the building cool. The Beijing Water Cube is the largest ETFE construction in the world, and because of its honeycomb-like structure, 3,500 ETFE bubbles must be cut individually, and sized. Factor in that the dimensions have been created in Germany and must be translated into a Chinese database and the Beijing Water Cube becomes a bit of a logistical nightmare. Beijing’s Water Cube represents a true morphing of molecular science, architecture and structural engineering.
Year: 2012
Genre: Documentary
Country: United States of America
Studio: National Geographic
Director:
Cast:
Crew:
First Air Date: Jan 01, 2004
Last Air date: May 24, 2012
Season: 9 Season
Episode: 158 Episode
Runtime: 60 minutes
IMDb: 7.00/10 by 14.00 users
Popularity: 47.829
Language: English, French, Hungarian
Keyword :
Episode
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Ultimate Skyscraper
Shanghai Super Tower
Beijing Water Cube
Sinking an Aircraft Carrier
Sinking an Aircraft Carrier
Icelandic Super Dam
Beijing Water Cube
Shanghai Super Tower
Bridge Breakdown
Deep Earth Drillers
Icelandic Super Dam
World Trade Center Bahrain
Atom Smasher
South Pole Station
The World's Biggest Cruiseliner
Beijing Olympic Stadium (Building Green Beijing)
Impossible Build
World Trade Center Bahrain