A win for Team China

In Beijing, the largest Olympic venues are landmarks in an old-fashioned sense, and the ruling party is determined to bask in their reflected glow. In recent weeks, the Chinese press, in the sort of quasi-Orwellian turn it has nearly perfected, has begun to give primary design credit for the Bird's Nest to the local architects who aided Herzog & De Meuron in executing it. Some news reports have excised the Swiss firm completely.

In other cases, Western designers are keen to excise themselves. A few days before I left Los Angeles for China, I phoned the Boston office of Sasaki Associates, the large design firm that created the master plan for the Olympic Green, which extends north from the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, includes nearly a dozen other venues and covers a total of 2,800 acres.

I was put through to Dennis Pieprz, the president of the firm, who oversaw its work on the Green. After I asked him whether he would be in the capital during my visit and available to give me a tour of the results, there was a long pause.

"Well, I haven't been to Beijing in quite some time," he finally said, explaining that Olympic officials had taken over and modified the Sasaki plan so extensively that the firm now basically disavows the final product.

And there it was, plain as day on the firm's website, when I went back to check: "Sasaki had no involvement in the design and implementation of the final landscape for the Beijing Olympics."

So much for signature Olympic architecture. This is something closer to the reverse: A firm anxious to scrub its name from the official record before the Games get underway.

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christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com