Now it has the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube and the Egg.

China's capital, riding the fortunes of boundless economic growth and enjoying the international spotlight as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, is getting a facelift. When 4 billion TV viewers tune in next year, they will see a nation striving for status through a new generation of gleaming, avant-garde buildings in all shapes and sizes, many designed by some of the world's star architects.

The government is spending some $40 billion on 14 new venues and massive infrastructure upgrades for the Olympic Games - more than double the $16 billion Greece spent to prepare Athens for the 2004 Summer Games.

The steel-and-concrete upheaval is the latest transformation of a city that has experienced destruction and renewal by successive empires. Beijing, perched on a great plain in northern China, has been a cultural and political center since the Mongol occupation in 13th century. The once-walled city now has a skyline of construction cranes and is filled with churning dust as glass towers rise up from the congested streets - designer buildings that look like giant dominoes, layered cakes or even upside-down boats lined up in a row, each trying to make a statement that Beijing has arrived as a great modern metropolis. In the rush to create a new Beijing - with expanded roads, new subway lines and an upscale downtown - hundreds of old courtyard houses in the city's once-pervasive single-story hutong neighborhoods have been demolished.

"Sometimes we get lost in the city because it is changing so fast," said Zhang Lixin, director of the Beijing Municipal City Planning Commission. "Not only is the image of the city changing, but also the thinking of the people living here."

Beijing's Olympic Green, designed by U.S.-based Sasaki Associates, will be almost three times the size of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and will feature the 91,000-seat National Stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The tangle of twiglike steel, nicknamed the Bird's Nest, dwarfs everything around it. More than 5,000 workers weld and hammer day and night on the $386 million stadium. Though it's not expected to be completed until early next year, the site has become a tourist attraction.

Next door is the National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube because it looks like a giant ice cube covered with bubbles. The $125 million water-sports venue will seat 11,000 spectators and was designed by Australia's PTW Architects. Several miles to the west, the Beijing Shooting Range Hall has been designed in the shape of a pistol by the Architectural Design Institute of Qinghua University.

Even without Olympics projects, the city is undergoing a massive construction makeover along with the rest of eastern, coastal China. It has been estimated that as much as half of the world's concrete is being poured into China construction projects, and as much as a third of global steel production is going to high rises across the nation. In Beijing alone, planning officials in each of the past five years have granted permits for more than 645 million-square-feet of new construction. That's equal to approving 1,300 structures the size of San Francisco's signature Transamerica Pyramid each year.

Visitors to the Egg, a performing-arts center designed by French architect Paul Andreu and officially called the National Grand Theater, must pass under a giant moat. The structure, expected to open in September, rubs up against the 600-year-old Forbidden City.

Then there is the nearly completed new international and domestic airport terminal, a $2 billion project designed in the form of a dragon's scaly back by British architect Norman Foster. The terminal, scheduled to open in 2008, is expected to increase annual passenger traffic over the next eight years from 38 million to 66 million, about twice the population of California.

This quick-changing architectural landscape, though, is now facing a great wall of criticism.

Tsinghua University architectural professor Alfred Peng accuses some Western architects of snookering government leaders into letting them treat Beijing as a place to test new and expensive designs that have no aesthetic relationship to the surrounding environment.

Ma Yansong, a 31-year-old rising Chinese architectural star, believes government officials are not as naive as Peng believes: They have chosen architecture that sends a political message of "new and powerful" to the world.

"We are making many mistakes," said Ma. "But I'm still feeling positive. The Chinese are becoming much more open and international."