The Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed "The Bird's Nest," has already become an icon in the country of 1.3 billion. But for some farmers close to Hangzhou (located in the southeast of China), the Herzog & de Meuron structure was just too darn far away... so in a fit of DIY ingenuity, they built their own replica out of bamboo. Steel's apparently kind of hard to get when you're living on a couple of dollars a day.


Altogether, it took ten bamboo sculptors roughly two weeks to put together the Bird's Nest (at a 1:20 scale of the Beijing original) out of 800 pieces of bamboo. The villagers say they plan to use the structure for local sports events. Hmmm... As cool as this DIY structure is, I'm not sure what kind of sport you'd be able to fit in it. Ping pong? [Shufa via Weird Asia News]


And just for comparison, the Beijing Stadium: