Is Rem Koolhaas's gravity-defying Beijing monument the world's most important building? Alex Pasternack on the construction of a conundrum
On the morning of December 4 a few hundred men and women from around the country gathered outside the Beijing headquarters of China Central Television, the country's largest TV network, to do something brave or crazy: they wanted CCTV to hear and perhaps air their grievances. Chinese authorities forbid such public demonstrations without a permit (and these are naturally impossible to obtain), but the assembled crowd, each of whom came bearing complaints about corruption or police abuses, had a few reasons for optimism. The government had declared December 4 to be "Legal Day" in 2001, in order to promote reform and warn officials about corruption. And two weeks earlier, an extraordinary memo from the country's propaganda chief to news outlets had demanded that protests, disasters and other unfortunate events be reported immediately - rather than being quietly whitewashed.
The CCTV building sits on an enclosed 22 acre plot of windswept land near the Military Museum and a monument to the return of Hong Kong to the Motherland, along the western side of the wide central boulevard that also passes Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Even though it opened in the 1990s, the dreary state-powered fortress looks like a Cold War relic, its 30 rectangular storeys of concrete and glass capped off by a slab of concrete that appears to float two storeys above the rest, with a tall antenna rising from its centre. This flourish, along with a coat of light blue paint that wraps around the front façade, twists the building's menacing technocratic features into something almost cartoonish.
Later on, when CCTV-1's flagship news show Good Morning Beijing carried a feature on how the government would mark "Legal Day", no mention was made of the demonstration. Outside a legion of white vans pulled up and, according to witnesses, some 500 police officers carted away hundreds of demonstrators to detention centres - a sad irony, since many of them had come to protest the unlawful detention of petitioners. I asked a CCTV producer about the protest a few days later. "There are always petitioners outside," he said. "I'm now so used to it that I don't often pay attention."
CCTV, a state-run company with billion-dollar profits, commands an audience vastly larger than every major television network in the United States and Europe, though few in the West have ever heard of it. But by next year, when 10,000 CCTV employees move into a digitally-equipped headquarters designed by Rem Koolhaas at the centre of Beijing’s cosmopolitan Central Business District, its executives will have placed the company on the map, literally and figuratively. The new location is an obvious hint of the network’s ambition to shed its starchy, closed-circuit reputation and hurl itself into the 21st century as China’s answer to the BBC.
But it is the new building’s design – a skyscraper bent into an angular gravity-defying doughnut – that truly screams CCTV’s battle plan to a global audience. Coincidentally or not, Koolhaas’ new headquarters resembles a mouth open in proclamation, or hung agape in disbelief, as if trying to figure out how it twists so much steel and glass.
Other puzzles linger in its jagged, Erector-set façade. How and why did Koolhaas, architecture’s enfant terrible, who was better known a decade ago for his books than for his buildings, and his 37-year-old accomplice, Ole Scheeren, who has designed a series of Prada stores, end up producing the world’s most sensational structure – a headquarters for the world’s biggest propaganda outlet? Has China co-opted Koolhaas – or is it the other way around?
Like any great work of art, the cubist television palace raises more questions than it answers. It has revived a lively and timely debate about the ethics of architecture, and raised a rare kind of ire among critics. Domestic designers question its excess while foreigners – still haunted by the work western architects did for prior totalitarian regimes – have cited it to press a boycott on building in China.
Others, meanwhile, have wondered if CCTV is trying to reinvent itself from the outside in. Koolhaas has insisted that his building is evidence of the network's desire for change, and suggested that his radical design, a 21st century successor to modernism's unbuilt utopias, will itself usher in change at CCTV – the kind of claim the network's Party members would scoff at.
Either way, CCTV's new monument is already Koolhaas's crowning masterpiece, as much for its ambiguity as its ambition. It is a test case for what radical architecture might achieve, and at the same time, evidence of how even today's most radical buildings and their builders may get bent by the state.
For CCTV the building is not just a new home: it is a logo writ large, an icon for network and state alike. When it became clear that the headquarters could not be completed in time to serve as a broadcast centre for the Beijing Olympics, pressure fell on a team of hundreds of architects and thousands of workers to at least make the building camera-ready as a backdrop for the Games. For a company that embodied “complete loyalty” to the Communist Party, the head of the Chinese film and radio authority said at the groundbreaking, the structure was to be a “revolutionary symbol”.
The same thinking has underwritten lavish architecture for state and corporate clients for centuries. In China, the icon impulse hit hard as officials readied for their Olympics close-up. Beginning in the late 1990s government leaders launched the world's most symbolic building spree, greenlighting "the Giant Egg", Paul Andreu's bulbous space ship of an opera house, Norman Foster's huge airport ("the Dragon"), PTW's "Water Cube" aquatics centre and Herzog and de Meuron's "Bird's Nest" stadium.
Names can be very literal in China, and a building's immediate symbolism can make or break its reputation. Andreu took quickly to the "egg" nickname as a sign of life inside, even if it wasn't meant as a compliment ("blob" and "dung pile" were other popular suggestions). Foster and PTW were also game for their tame monikers. And while they have since tried to shake it, the Swiss architects behind the steel-swathed stadium were keen enough to be the first to equate their design with a bird's nest, a sign of good fortune in China.
“It’s a very direct, literal culture and that’s an issue that you have to deal with when you enter the realm of conceptual issues,” Scheeren says. Koolhaas and colleagues at his Rotterdam-based firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), have been eager to explain that the enormous loop design promised innovation, collectivism and efficiency, while freeing China from the single-minded struggle for height of the Western skyscraper. “Architecture needs an argument, and Rem is very good at coming up with arguments,” says one former colleague. Design itself is not Koolhaas’s strong suit; the shape of CCTV, for instance, was devised by a young associate at OMA, Fernando Donis. “I think if you asked Rem he would probably say he’s a writer, not an architect,” the former colleague added.
But even for the rhetorician, OMA's startling design yielded no easy nomenclature. It was only after the design emerged in public that the nicknames surfaced, and they were starkly devoid of any references to traditional Chinese culture. At the beginning, wei fang, meaning condemned building, was one oft-heard option. Later, "twisted doughnut", "drunken towers", and "big shorts" became the most popular sobriquets in Beijing. The latter, a reference to the building's two rising towers, had special appeal to many online critics, young urbanites who despise CCTV: the word for "shorts" can also be translated as "underpants".
"Our building is no longer a single square," a young CCTV employee told me. "I don't know what it symbolises. Desire? Ambition? Stupidity?" Later, he said plainly: "it's a big hole in terms of content, and twisted in terms of fact." I asked Chen Shuyu, an architect in Beijing, about the building. "Big mouth," she said, "big lie." The building's central hole has inspired more vulgar suggestions.
Concerned that one of these monikers could stick, CCTV recently asked employees to vote for a more positive one, like "Harmonious Gate" or "New Angle". According to one Shanghai newspaper, "Knowledge Window", another option, quickly became a favourite among internet critics, largely because the Chinese name, zhichuang, is a homophone for "haemorrhoids".
Koolhaas is a fierce admirer of contradictions, and it's easy to imagine that the only complaint he would have with the catalogue of monikers is that they are too obvious. Scheeren insists this "history of names" is actually a sign of the building's greatest strength, its ambiguity. "It really undermines all characteristics of the traditional icon," he says.
At once forcibly futuristic and demode, spectacular and brooding on the outside, the CCTV headquarters will remain truly untested as an office building until employees move in next December. But many are reluctant to do so. One told me that the building's size and maze of 75 elevators are a widespread source of concern, threatening to turn the building into the setting for a Kafka story. "We'll spend half the day getting to the top," he said. "What we need is a new building that is larger and practical, not an extravaganza."
But navigating the building may be among the least of its new residents’ concerns: it is a 230-metre engineering feat planted in an active earthquake zone. And yet, Scheeren says, it is “the safest big building in China, if not in the world.” Along with help from a steel exoskeleton that varies in density where more support is needed, the building is held up by a system of piles 52 metres deep and an array of concrete-encased steel columns thicker than any previously used in China, the strongest of which support 17,700 tons, roughly equivalent to 105 jumbo jets or the combined weight of the population of Nottingham. When Chinese engineers turned up the vibrations on a steel scale model of the building to a catastrophic 8.6 on the Richter scale, the structure came out unscathed. But then the building has to face gravitational challenges just to stay upright: as Rory McGowan, the lead engineer from Arup, OMA’s engineering partner, has put it, the building is “basically trying to fall over.”
Even now, roughly a year before it even opens, the building tends to gets lost within its own mythos: a mix of history, rumour and propaganda. Some articles on the internet proclaim – with equal parts relief and Schadenfreude – that the building has been cancelled for safety and cost reasons. (A few months after CCTV’s groundbreaking in 2004, those concerns did lead premier Wen Jiabao to put the building and other prestige projects on hold; it was relaunched nine months later). “Many people still don’t believe it’s going to happen,” Ole Scheeren said in 2006, his voice a mix of dismissal and delight. The building’s two towers, leaning towards each other at six degrees, were already taking their daring shape. “It’s been quite difficult, actually, to believe it myself.”
CCTV is a self-conscious attempt, in Koolhaas's own words, to "kill the skyscraper" – a form he once praised but now blames for the ills of the modern city. "The skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success," he has written. "The intensification of density it initially delivered has been replaced by carefully spaced isolation." If tall buildings trade the healthy bustle of the street below for the symbol of the skies, CCTV's squat mix of corporate and public space forcibly unites the vanities of architecture with the practical aims of urbanism.
"It's a building that allows OMA to achieve for the first time what many architects have tried to do – make a high-rise more complex than a single isolated tower," Deyan Sudjic, the director of the Design Museum in London, wrote in an email. "As such it will earn its place in the history of building."
Such high praise has been widespread – Christopher Hawthorne, the influential architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times, called it “the most significant piece of architecture of our young century.” But it comes with some crucial questions about the responsibility and power of the master architect under a modern authoritarian state. “It is hard to imagine a cool European architect in the 1970s building a television station for General Pinochet,” Ian Buruma wrote before the CCTV competition was even over, while Daniel Libeskind publicly chastised his peers for working in China. “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes,” he proclaimed.
But for architects who want to build, it can be hard to deny the call of China, with its absence of red tape, cheap labour and materials and, until recently at least, ample capital. Even Libeskind’s firm is building a cultural centre in Hong Kong – governed by a different system, to be sure, but still part of China. But the debate need not pit total resistance against opportunistic complicity; in a sense Koolhaas’s balancing act of a building may be the world’s most spectacular document of architectural ethics, a ping-pong game between engagement and fantasy, power and possibility. “Maybe,” Scheeren says, “these buildings have already polarised discussion and stimulated a debate that in itself can become the most crucial and important outcome of this whole period.”
But raising the matter doesn’t exactly excuse the architects from engaging it. “It would be unreasonable to object to building a hospital or a hotel in contemporary China,” Sudjic notes in his book The Edifice Complex. “But CCTV is the organisation that tells a billion people what to think, the mouthpiece of a governing Communist Party that permits no labour rights, which is eradicating Tibet’s identity and which censors its citizens’ e-mails.”
Scheeren said that the arguments for and against the building had been raised from the beginning at OMA and remained “an acute question as I work here every day.” Still, he said he found the continued political critique tiring, “an opportunistically ideological platform for little warfares, rather than the investigation of what could be better and how we could help to improve that.”
In his Beijing office, with a view overlooking the building, I asked Scheeren what he thought of Jacques Herzog's defence of the "Bird's Nest" stadium as a "Trojan horse" – a means of injecting new ideas into China in the guise of a state icon. One horse may not be enough, Scheeren said. "It is not a single horse, but a larger herd that has arrived."
The ethical questions brought into focus by the building are ones that Koolhaas, 64, clearly savours. After all, he became a famous architect not for his buildings but for his theories about them. For decades it was hard to tell where his outlandish theorising ended and his unpredictable architecture began. When Harvard, where Koolhaas used to teach a seminar, asked him to develop a proposal to extend the university's campus to the other side of the Charles River, the architect suggested moving the river. Koolhaas revels in the ambiguity and complexity of the architect's life, and no building is as ambiguous and complex as CCTV. "It is very legitimate to question my motives," he told an audience in 2007.
In Beijing the questions mounted to a point where in August 2003, Koolhaas came to defend the project at a meeting at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The building was unnecessarily risky and costly (it’s expected the final tally for the whole compound will push $1bn), and its use of materials seemed irresponsible. The foundation and base alone required the longest concrete pour in history, using over 7000 lorries for a 56-hour stream. Construction, rumour has it, was single-handedly responsible for a spike in the global price of steel.
The arguments he faced in Beijing were pragmatic, not philosophical, but Koolhaas has fought for the building as an idea. “The younger audience members questioned allocating resources to ‘prestige’, even while western China is ravaged by poverty; and the older generation of engineers was shocked to see the objective purity of their profession at the service of the unusual,” he wrote later. To Koolhaas, the choice was between past and future: “a refusal of the Promethean in the name of correctness and good sense could foreclose China’s architectural potential. CCTV headquarters is an ambitious building. It was conceived at the same time that the design competition for ground zero took place – not in the backward-looking US, but in the parallel universe of China.”
In fact, OMA passed up an invitation to participate in the competition for ground zero in favour of CCTV, a decision Koolhaas claims came after he opened a fortune cookie that read “Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Mixed Meat of Memory.” Scheeren said that the decision was actually based on long discussions about both cities. “In a way, [Beijing] seemed so much more promising, but also so much more challenging for an architect to engage with,” said Scheeren.
So it may be no accident that the building looks like two skyscrapers have collapsed into each other. As Cecil Balmond, the head engineer at Arup, and a frequent Koolhaas collaborator, said: “cut the loop, unfold the pieces and you end up with the twin towers of the World Trade Center.” The Twin Towers are not the only oversized American icon to serve as CCTV’s foil. “It’s actually larger than the Pentagon,” Scheeren told me when I first met him, as if describing a new toy. This is not true, it turns out. But the building’s utopian bigness – a Koolhaasian ideal – is one of its undeniable charms.
Even if Koolhaas invites critical questions, that doesn’t mean he enjoys discussing them, at least not anymore. He obsessively stalks new issues and ideas before the old questions have been fully answered. And lately his take on CCTV has become more ideological – and more honest. “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state,” he said not long ago. “There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate.” In the West, he said, “particularly in architecture, money is everything now,” but in China, money “is a less fundamental tenet of their ideology.”
Koolhaas has studied the country more than many other Western architects. But against the backdrop of contemporary China, where money reigns supreme and quality construction is still an endangered species, his response looks as rusty and reactionary as an old Communist monument. His admiration for “their ideology” is also a swipe at Western materialism and the undifferentiated work of its corporate architects. “The irony,” he said in a recent interview, “is that in the West, of all places, an overemphasis of the economic forces us into permanent chaos.”
A building like CCTV, in other words, needed the sponsorship of a muscular state with no profit motive. In an essay on the mothballed Modernist offices and cultural centres of Soviet Moscow, Koolhaas acknowledges the uncomfortable contradiction that plagues architecture's incorrigible utopian instinct ("it is the deep secret of all architecture, even the most debased"). "Reference to Utopia," Koolhaas wrote, is what gives the architect's work value, but any association with utopian political projects "will almost certainly be complicity with more or less serious crimes.
"And to make matters worse," he continued, "the more radical, innovative and brotherly our sentiments, the more we architects need a strong sponsor."
China’s recent history is littered with the terrible wreckage of utopian dreams – wreckage that extends far beyond architecture. But, Koolhaas reasoned, the public good was still more the province of communism than capitalism. If the state happened to be strong, all the better. In the winter of 2004 during a visit to the building site, Koolhaas was struck by a peek into China’s communal spirit: as two guards exchanged a shift, one passed off his heavy overcoat to the next. “Those are the things about China he really likes,” one Koolhaas confidant told me. “The gentle aspects of communism.”
CCTV’s roots go back to 1958, with the launch of a single television station dedicated to disseminating dispatches of the Communist Party. Today, the network, which has 17 national channels and an array of cable stations, is a model of China’s post command-economy paradigm, a hybrid communist-capitalist conglomerate that is more financially and operationally independent than ever.
In November, CCTV’s annual advertising auction, which draws a bevy of multinationals and domestic companies, netted a record return of $1.3 billion; Procter and Gamble was the biggest buyer. Much of the network’s regular audience are farmers and lower-to-middle income urbanites who tune in to see imperial soap operas and police dramas, singing contests and holiday galas. Though in recent years CCTV has sought to compete with grittier programming from local stations, with shows that forgo nationalist themes (one runaway hit was Divorce, Chinese Style), network executives are also obligated to abide by China’s rigid propaganda rules. In 2007, the main television regulator, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, instructed CCTV and other networks to limit prime-time programming to “ethically inspiring TV series” that could “reflect the reality of China in a positive way.”
If the question of what constitutes a Party-friendly drama remains open, there is little doubt about the network’s role as a provider of government propaganda. The network’s flagship evening news programme, Xinwen Lianbao, or “Network News”, is carried on every local news channel across the country, by orders of the government, and has an estimated nightly viewership of more than 660 million. But rather than Who, What, Where and When, the programme concentrates on Hu and Wen – China’s president and premier – with lavish coverage of their every statement and gesture
Over lunch with a producer at CCTV's international channel, I asked about CCTV's obligations to the Communist Party. He stared at his plate. His network had lobbied the network's leadership to keep the stale propagandising to a minimum for international viewers, of which there are few. "But we're paid by the state," said the producer, who asked not to be named, with a tone as defensive as it was hopeless. "How can we not run stories about our leaders' activities?"
If any year called for a new script, it was 2008. China's Olympic year brought a shocking abundance of blockbuster stories, from terrible snowstorms to tainted milk powder, with the Olympics tucked almost quietly in between. But two disasters illustrated the realities and tensions facing the network's news operations.
The violent protests that broke out in Tibet in March earned surprising wall-to-wall coverage on a network known for highlighting the Party's "harmonious society". The slant was less surprising: along with an endless stream of tragic stories told by Han Chinese victims, the broadcasts were peppered with references to a conspiracy by the "Dalai Lama clique".
In May, as that uproar was fading, a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province. The network would receive some praise for its unprecedented coverage of a national disaster. But this wasn't an act of enlightened journalism. After unofficial reports started trickling out from the earthquake zone despite a gag order by the powerful Propaganda Department, the government had no choice but to backtrack. CCTV's coverage was a bid to wrest the message away from the internet, where young Chinese increasingly get their news – and vent their opinions. Though vivid and often moving, CCTV's coverage of the military rescue effort and the generosity of citizens steered clear of hard statistics and attempted to skirt the widespread school collapses that killed thousands of children.
While the internet is forcing officials to rewrite their rule books (the country’s propaganda chief issued a memo in November insisting that state media be the first to report bad news), CCTV executives are scrambling to rejigger their marketing plans. “More than any other force, the internet has shocked CCTV out of its Sybaritic stupor,” said David Wolf, a Beijing-based consultant on Chinese media. “The data its leadership has collected over the past five years has corroborated what advertisers had been telling them: the internet was no longer a toy of students and foreigners,” but was starting to steal crucial young audiences from television. “CCTV knows it cannot long survive as an enterprise – or, indeed, fulfil its political charter – if it loses young urban professionals.”
But for young and educated urbanites, tired of state-run news, bombastic war films and imperial soap operas, the internet and pirated DVDs hold more appeal. "Few of my friends watch any TV," said Liang Jingyu, an architect in Beijing. "They're liars, a mouthpiece, and want to brainwash everyone." Even the CCTV producer told me he doesn't watch his own network.
CCTV is trying hard to attract young viewers: last year it added a number of US programs to one of its high definition cable channels, including Desperate Housewives, 24 and Lost. A large part of the new building will be devoted to internet programming, which will distribute video to computers and mobile phones.
And the building itself – the anti-icon icon – seems designed to appeal to those same disgruntled youth. "The building all but screams 'look at us – we're big, we're cool, we're global, and we're everything a smart young Chinese aspires to,'" David Wolf says. "People who see the building as an talisman of bureaucratic ego miss the point. In both location and style, it is a monument to what CCTV aspires to be to its own audience."
Executives and government officials are also aiming to lure more foreign viewers, perhaps by turning CCTV into a Chinese version of Al-Jazeera. A strategy leaked in mid-January indicated that the country's biggest media giants, led by CCTV, plan to spend an estimated $6.6bn to expand overseas, just as many Western media outlets continue to close foreign bureaus.
Though the details remain unclear, the plan fits with China's increasing sensitivity about its image abroad. In a New Year's essay, China's propaganda director Liu Yunshan emphasised the importance of burnishing that image. "It has become an urgent strategic task for us to make our communication capability match our international status," he wrote. "In this modern era, who gains the advanced communication skills, the powerful communication capability and whose culture and value is more widely spread is able to more effectively influence the world."
CCTV has the resources needed to become a serious global news outlet like al Jazeera, if not the BBC, the producer told me. “We have a very competent staff; we have our own money to send journalists and correspondents around the world.” He added that the network was also dedicated to capturing the attention of the world – a seduction its stunning and elusive architectural wonder has begun.
But like information, capabilities and intentions have a way of getting twisted by the time they hit the air. “CCTV can expand surely, become more savvy, with fancier ads,” he said. “But if we’re talking about fundamental change, well, maybe that’s not likely.”
Alex Pasternack is a writer based in Beijing and New York. His writing has been published in Time, the Guardian and Architectural Record.