Merely enjoying its annual profit from selling the tour tickets, the Birds Nest (the BJ 2008 Olympic Stadium) has become a hollow symbol in the post-Olympic era.

 

Rather than dividing the void and vast Olympic Park into small scale space with different functions, we propose to integrate the area as a new business district located on the Beijing Axis. By lifting the existing square and rehabilitating it as an open landscape, not only the Olympic Park maintains integrity for holding big events, but also new space emerges underneath, which can be organized as a mix of retail, entertainment and cultural programs on the site.

 

To fill the newly emerged space with varied activities, we find Hutong, a suitable model of small-scale and multi-function, by reviewing the history of ancient Beijing City. With the concept of reconstructing disappeared Hutong on the site parametrically, we made 69 prototypical models by scaling down the disappeared Hutong blocks 10 times into courtyard structures. By running the models in Processing, we finally got a layout of ‘blocks’, as well as the ‘Hutong’ in between.