Embracing Koolhaas’s Friendly Skyscraper
A computer image showing the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing. The building is scheduled to be completed in 2008.
Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.
But if the five-million-square-foot building is one of the largest ever constructed, its architect sees it as a people-friendly reinvention of the skyscraper.
“Awe is not usually a condition our buildings inspire,” Mr. Koolhaas said in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art, where a show devoted to the Central Chinese Television building — known as CCTV — opened yesterday. “Amidst all the skyscrapers there, it’s relatively low. It will feel accessible.”
Tina di Carlo, an assistant curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department, said the goal of the exhibition was not so much to bring the CCTV design to people’s attention; the building is already something of a phenomenon in architectural circles. She said she and Mr. Koolhaas’s firm set out to address the preconceptions that people bring to an enormous tower. “It’s a radical rethinking of the tall building typography,” she said.
The television building is essentially an upside down U with right angles, an office tower bent out of shape. Ole Scheeren, the partner in charge of the CCTV project at Mr. Koolhaas’ firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, said the structure might be frightening “if it was a pure gesture.”
“But since it’s actually a circuit of life inside, it’s a huge social catalyst,” he said.
Since the Chinese government chose Mr. Koolhaas’s design in a competition in 2002, rumors have circulated that the building was too ambitious to ever get built. But construction photos on view at the show, taken as recently as last month, suggest that it may well be completed on schedule in 2008. “It confirms it’s actually going forward,” Ms. di Carlo said. “There were so many rumors that it wasn’t.”
Through models, drawings and extensive wall text, the exhibition — “OMA in Beijing” — explains the various activities that will unfold inside the tower, detailing circulation patterns that encourage staff members and visitors to intersect; amenities like restaurants and health clubs; even a small hospital. “It’s a fiendishly complex building in terms of program and structure,” Mr. Koolhaas said.
The show juxtaposes the Beijing project with images from MoMA’s collection, from Mies van der Rohe’s first glass skyscraper to the mechanical structures of Peter Cook to the organic growth of Kisho Kurokawa.
The exhibition represents a new effort by the Modern to explore architectural projects that have yet to be completed; the first was last year’s show about the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is being converted into a landscaped park. The goal is to present architecture in new ways, “to get away from plan, section, elevation,” Ms. di Carlo said.
The architects insist that practical concerns drive their design but note that it is also upending tradition. “Hardly any building really engages space,” Mr. Scheeren said. “Most skyscrapers exhaust space. This building leaves open the space it encapsulates. It activates the ground. It draws activities into the building.”
The architects could have created a campus with each of the company’s various functions in a building of its own. Instead they decided to unite them in a single structure, with everyone connected through the spaces they jointly inhabit. In addition to 10,000 workers, several thousand visitors are expected each day. “It attains the critical mass of a small city,” Mr. Scheeren said. “It becomes a collective in its own right.”
Glass peepholes about 15 feet in diameter, in the floor of the large viewing deck at the underside of the building’s cantilever, will afford vertical views to the ground some 500 feet below. “Staff and visitors move in parallel, can observe each other, can meet and congregate,” Mr. Scheeren said.
The CCTV project also includes a second, more modest building that will house a five-star hotel with 300 rooms, restaurants and spas, recording studios and a 1,500-seat theater. Mr. Koolhaas’s design provides untrammeled circulation from the outdoor plaza to the inside foyer to the backstage area, clearing space so that television cameras can move freely. The floors are equipped with hydraulic platforms.
There are also digital screening rooms, a multi-use ballroom, 20 audiovisual rooms, an exhibition hall and a press room in the second building. The architects describe that structure, the Television Cultural Center or TVCC, as the public component of the project, a kind of “fun palace.” It is to open ahead of the larger headquarters, at the end of 2007.
China’s television network — with more than one billion viewers — will be capable of broadcasting 250 channels when the headquarters is completed. CCTV currently produces and broadcasts just 16 channels.
Mr. Koolhaas won the competition at an important moment for China: recently admitted to the World Trade Organization and selected as the site for the 2008 Olympic games, the country was exploding with soaring new architecture projects. While CCTV is technically not being built for the Olympics, it will be the main broadcaster for the games, Mr. Scheeren said.
The scope of the project forced Mr. Koolhaas’s firm to open a separate office in Rotterdam, where it was already based; it has also established a permanent office in Beijing. By the end nearly 400 architects, engineers and consultants in Europe, Asia and the United States will have worked on the CCTV Tower, producing some 6,000 drawings. “We never did a building of this scale,” Mr. Koolhaas said.
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