National Centre for the Performing Arts

The National Centre for the Performing Arts stands just west of Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, completed in 2007 to a design by the French architect Paul Andreu. Its titanium and glass dome, elliptical in plan and popularly nicknamed the Giant Egg, encloses an opera house, a concert hall and a theater beneath a single continuous shell that sits within an artificial lake, with public access reached through an underground pedestrian tunnel that passes beneath the water. The building's stark, self-contained modern form drew considerable controversy in China both for its cost and for its sharp visual contrast with the historic imperial-era architecture of the adjacent Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square precinct. At night the dome's glass central band is illuminated from within, making the building, and the lake reflecting it, a prominent feature of Beijing's skyline near the historic city center.