The Beijing National Stadium by Herzog & de Meuron (with the artist Ai Weiwei) — popularly the 'Bird's Nest' — is an iconic example of contemporary architecture's tendency to abolish the distinction between structure and envelope. Modern architecture long thought of the load-bearing skeleton and the façade covering it as two separate systems; here the two melt into a single weave.

The net of giant steel girders wrapping the stadium, crossing over one another in an apparently random arrangement, is at once the building's load-bearing structure, its outer façade, and the system holding its roof — all at the same time. This 'irregularity' is in fact deceptive: every seemingly scattered steel element is calculated to carry the loads of the seating mass and the weight of the roof. A movable retractable roof was originally planned to span the gaps of the net; when this was abandoned the openings were filled with a translucent membrane, and the random look of the weave partly arose from the idea of concealing these roof elements.

Calculating so complex, irregular-looking a geometry and manufacturing each steel piece at a unique angle and length was possible only with digital/parametric design and fabrication tools — a mature link in the line, begun at the Bilbao Guggenheim, where form is resolved by computer model and fabricated numerically. The Bird's Nest is one of the most recognised public buildings of the early 21st century, in which structure, façade, and symbol (the weave of a bird's nest) merge into a single parametric weave.