BEIJING: The last time Beijing stumped the world with mind-blowing architecture, a Ming dynasty emperor had ordered up the Forbidden City in the shadows of the Great Wall.

Enter Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who are among the latest foreign hotshots the city has enlisted in pursuit of modern wonders as bold and mystifying.

Come the 2008 Olympics, their National Stadium will allow the hosts to cut a surreal, progressive figure. The veiny flesh of their steel-roped creation is its very bones.

Beijingers know the space-age project by a more down-home nickname — the “bird’s nest”.

“I think the Chinese people understand that it’s a strength to open themselves and to ask people from the outside to work,” de Meuron said during a recent visit to the capital.

The city, built on a flat ancient grid, is today a crazy quilt of old and new, hidden under covers of neon and dust.

Jumbled by seismic historical shifts and diced up by construction, the urban jigsaw sketches a century of change — from exclusive courtyards to crumbling labyrinths, proletarian tenements to commercial hunks of kitsch.

Beside the bird’s nest, Frenchman Paul Andreu’s contentious National Theatre, or the “duck egg”, as some residents dubbed it, is due to open diagonally opposite from the Forbidden City next year.

Dutch iconoclast Rem Koolhaas’s state television headquarters, which some have labelled a “twisted doughnut”, will loom over the city’s corporate heart by 2007.

In November, Beijing pronounced Briton Norman Foster the winner of a contest to design a new $2 billion airport terminal.

So much for monuments made in the image of emperors, cadres and technocrats. The totems of the next age appear to be zany engineering experiments picked by semi-democratic juries.

“They see this as a sign of strength,” said de Meuron.—Reuters