By Song Peijing

Special to the Tsinghua News Center

Hosting the 2008 Olympic Games is exciting for everyone living in Beijing. Tsinghua’s faculty and students are doing their best in different ways to contribute to the event’s preparation.

Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park, covering 680 hectares to the north of the city, was designed by Tsinghua University’s Urban Planning & Design Institute. The landscape design for the park won first prize in the Urban Green Spaces section of the 2007 “Torsanlorenzo International Prize” in Italy, the first time China has won this honor. The design concept for Forest Park is called "Axis to Nature". It responds to a complex brief and produces a coherent, elaborate and elegant solution. The design emphasizes the harmonious coexistence of man and nature and embodies traditional Chinese garden culture. Its Chief Designer, associate professor Hu Jie from Tsinghua’s School of Architecture, says the design features traditional Chinese hill-water garden style and also embraces many modern elements including subway stations, a large-scale open air theatre, a broad lake, and some advanced ecological elements. The project won this prize also for its “sustainable use of materials and technology”, which “makes it of considerable contemporary importance”, according to the appraisal from the Prize jury.

(Professor Hu Jie and the Beijing Olympic Forest Park )

Professor Wu Guanying from Tsinghua’s Academy of Arts and Design (AAD) was a main designer of the mascots for the 2008 Beijing Olympic and the 2008 Paralympics.

(Professor Wu Guanying)        

(Fuwa--2008 Olympic Mascots)

Apart from the mascot design, AAD joined in the designs for Olympic sculptures, the torch, and many environmental facilities. In the China Beijing Olympic Park City Sculpture Design Competition, AAD won 30 prizes including nine Excellent Artwork prizes, the highest awards. AAD also won first prize for the overall design of the Beijing Olympic Park Environmental Facilities Design Contest.

Tsinghua’s Architectural Design & Research Institute designed the gymnasium for Judo and Taekwondo located at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

(Judo and Taekwondo Gymnasium)

The Department of Automotive Engineering has also developed different kinds of environmental friendly vehicles for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including fuel cell buses, natural gas/hydrogen hybrid electric buses, and micro electric vehicles.

(Fuel Cell City Buses)

 (Natural Gas/Hydrogen Hybrid Electric Buses)

With a long tradition of encouraging students to participate in physical exercise and sports, Tsinghua has a strong faculty in physical training and 34 student sport teams. About ten faculty members in the Teaching and Research Division of Physical Culture will serve as judges and coaches at different events. The students’ excellent performance in domestic and international sports events is well known. Some student athletes are training hard to compete for places on the 2008 National Olympic teams. Others are enthusiastically signing up as Olympic volunteers. About 7,000 registered volunteers from Tsinghua are taking training programs to prepare for the 2008 Olympics.