A win for Team China

Organizers were careful, however, not to make too many changes to the main architectural icons of these Games: Herzog & De Meuron's National Stadium, known as the "Bird's Nest," and the so-called Water Cube, by the Australian firm PTW, which will hold the swimming and diving events. They never lost sight of the fact that the two buildings are sure to star in worldwide television coverage of the Games, taking up the role that Salt Lake City's Mormon Temple and the main stadium in Athens, with a new roof by Santiago Calatrava, played in recent Olympiads.

The Bird's Nest lost a planned retractable roof to cost-cutting, but its total capacity fell just 10,000 seats, to 90,000, and it remains the most daring stadium built anywhere in the last decade, edging out even Herzog & De Meuron's own Allianz-Arena in Munich. The Water Cube, for its part, is a sleek, contemporary and wholly persuasive version of the building type that architects and theorists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in their classic 1972 book "Learning From Las Vegas," define as a "duck": A structure whose form is synonymous with, or advertises, its function.

The Water Cube is covered in huge bubbles, some nearly 25 feet across, made of a synthetic, translucent material known as ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene): The whole structure radiates the idea of water. If the concept seems a bit forced, the final product has an easy, unforced charisma. And inside, the quality of light filtering through those bubbles is ethereal, combining with the diving platforms and the blue-and-white plastic seats to create an effect somewhere between community pool and Gothic cathedral.

The Bird's Nest and the Water Cube also suggest the huge civic and urban-planning importance that ruling-party officials in Beijing attach to these Olympics. The buildings sit astride a new boulevard tracing the same north-south axis that bisects Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City -- the most significant axis in any Chinese city.

That level of ambition and pride is directly at odds with how Olympic planning has lately unfolded in the West. Officials in London, the 2012 host, seem reluctant -- perhaps simply because they're British and don't really do Muscle-Flexing Nationalism -- to make the main stadium impressive for anything but its modesty. The Olympics have come to London twice before, in 1908 (when it filled in for Rome after an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius) and 1948. Peter Cook's 2012 design calls for a lightweight, low-key building that can be dismantled when the Games are over. Chicago, which is vying for the 2016 Games, is also proposing a self-effacing, temporary Olympic stadium, by the architect Ben Wood.