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CCTV Tower Mirrors Beijing's Rising
Ambitions
 
Height:
234m
Floors: 49
Area: 550,000 sq m
Construction start: September 2004
Construction completed: 2008/2009
Five years ago, Rem Koolhaas and Ole
Scheeren unveiled their radical design for the new China Central Television
Tower here to a disbelieving public. Even their client wasn't sure it could
be built, they say.
Formed like a misshapen square doughnut, the building is
full of technical challenges, with two towers leaning inward at sharp
inclines that will be joined to form one continuous loop.
There were no building codes for this convoluted sort of
structure, which Messrs. Koolhaas and Scheeren conceived as a challenge to
the notion that all skyscrapers should point skyward. (Complicating matters:
Beijing lies in an earthquake zone.)
Now, the moment is fast approaching for a crucial part of
the tower's construction. In a matter of weeks, workers will construct the
floors that will join the two leaning towers, producing the building's
unusual shape.
The technical details are like something from a
science-fiction novel: The joining must be performed at dawn. That's because
heat from the sun expands steel in different portions of the tower over the
course of the day, and such distortions must be avoided at all costs.
"If one tower is distorted, it would be locked into the system and tax
the whole system," says Mr. Scheeren, grasping a scale model of the
CCTV Tower in his hands as if it were a giant Rubik's cube ready to be
solved.
The CCTV Tower is probably the most ambitious of an
estimated 10,000 new structures being built in Beijing, a symbol of why
China's capital is developing a reputation as the "Wild East" in
architectural circles. Mr. Scheeren, for example, says it would be unlikely
that this structure could be built anywhere else in the world because the
design would not be permitted by building codes elsewhere. In China, there
was an openness to making things happen that "created an extraordinary
context for architecture," says Mr. Scheeren.
With the 2008 Olympics in mind, China's authorities have
been trying to transform Beijing, an ancient city crafted by rulers such as
Kublai Khan, into a modern metropolis. They're doing this through a
collection of buildings that make statements, including an Olympic stadium
shaped like a bird's nest, an egg-shaped National Theater and the
bubble-wrapped Watercube, where Olympic swimming events will be held.
But the $800 million CCTV Tower looms large in the public
imagination. Both massive and controversial, it is likely to become a symbol
of China's recent accomplishments. The building will be the second largest
office building in the world, after the Pentagon, and a visible emblem of
China's state-controlled media, China Central Television, the country's only
nationwide broadcaster.
The imminent joining essentially borrows from
bridge-building technology, except that if the section were a bridge, it
would be an exceptionally large and cumbersome one. It is a full 11 stories
high at some points, and it includes a cantilevered overhang -- scheduled to
be completed in February -- that will jut out almost 250 feet into
nothingness.
Five years ago, it would have been impossible to engineer
the tower because high-speed computational systems -- particularly for
seismic analyses -- weren't as sophisticated, says Andrew Chan, group deputy
chairman of Arup Group Ltd., a global design and business consulting firm.
"We had to write the rulebook," he says.
Rocco Yim, one of the judges at the design competition that
eventually picked the square tower, says he initially had great reservations
about the "extremely irrational design." But he came to see it as
representing "a certain spirit that is just what the new China is all
about," says the Hong Kong-based architect. "Irreverent, a can-do
spirit, fearless and extremely confident."
To help make the CCTV Tower a reality, Mr. Scheeren took
the unusual step of moving to China in 2004 to supervise things, a role
usually performed by local engineers and architects after the design stage.
But it was an important step for Mr. Scheeren, 36 years old, who wasn't yet
a household name like his mentor Mr. Koolhaas, winner of the Pritzker Prize,
the highest honor in architectural circles. The Prada-clad Mr. Scheeren is
best-known for designing several award-winning stores for the Italian
fashion brand and has never worked on a product of CCTV's magnitude before.
Beijing's building codes had no provision for a building of
this shape, so municipal authorities formed a special panel of 13 structural
engineers especially for the CCTV Tower. The building was approved in 2004,
two years after the design competition.
For much of 2004, the team studied a three-story-high
replica of the CCTV Tower that they had placed on a "shake table,"
which is a hydraulic platform that simulates earthquake tremors. The
platform was equipped with several hundred sensors to help builders monitor
the movements of the more than 10,000 steel beams in the tower and see which
parts of the building would undergo the most stress under different
conditions.
As a result, the outer surface of CCTV Tower will be
wrapped in a steel mesh resembling a diamond-like net, with the main
structure of the building outside, instead of inside. Pressures can
"literally travel around the system and find the best load path into
the ground," says Mr. Scheeren. Parts of the mesh, including the areas
where the building has the most stress, such as the corners, are visibly
denser, and they have been incorporated into the building's design.
In addition, the building is covered with glass coated with
a pattern made of gray, baked-on enamel, providing more effective shade from
the sun. This "merges very well with the air quality of Beijing,"
remarks Mr. Scheeren. In fact, on days of high pollution in the capital, the
glass will appear to dissolve in the sky, leaving only the net of the
structure visible, as though lightning had frozen in the sky.
Critics argue that it's impossible to separate the
building's form from its function housing one of the biggest propaganda
units in the world. CCTV is both the biggest media company in the country
and the official voice of the Communist Party. It will also be the sole
Chinese broadcaster during next year's Olympics, and as a result, the image
of the CCTV Tower will be beamed to millions of homes.
Last year architecture critic Inga Saffron wrote that
Messrs. Koolhaas and Scheeren may be remembered "as the ones who gave
China's TV monopoly the architectural equivalent of the bomb." Ms.
Saffron, a fan of Mr. Koolhaas's work, said in a phone interview that
"the message from the design is very scary," referring to the
cantilevered portion of CCTV Tower that hangs thousands of feet above the
ground. Coupled with the gargantuan size of the overall site -- about the
size of 37 football fields -- the CCTV Tower will "always remind you of
how small you are, and how big the state," Ms. Saffron said.
CCTV Tower's builders say it is designed to withstand major
earthquakes without collapsing. Northern China's biggest earthquake in
recent years happened in Tangshan city, more than 90 miles from Beijing. The
1976 earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and killed more than
200,000 people.
To make space for the main square tower and an adjoining
boot-shaped tower, hundreds of Beijing residents in the area were forcibly
evicted and, they say, offered inadequate compensation.
Retired teacher Qiu Guizhi, 57, was distraught when she
returned home from a trip to find herself evicted. She was so desperate and
angry, she says, that she climbed up to the roof of the building and tried
to jump. She was stopped by the police and held in detention for 10 days.
She says she still hasn't received a penny of her promised $40,000 in
compensation.
Mr. Scheeren has been kept busy defending his creation. A
few months ago, he spoke as part of a panel organized by the Berlin Academy
of Fine Arts on the topic of architects who design for autocratic regimes.
"Historically architects have built for those in power," he said.
"How else are great buildings made? Or paid for?" Later, in an
email, Mr. Scheeren clarified his statements, saying, "Historically,
much of large-scale architecture has been produced for governments or
powerful organizations. And this dependency/conflict will remain a complex
issue for architecture generally."
He has also said that his architecture firm received many
indications, including explicit statements, that CCTV was interested in
becoming more liberal and independent and was seeking a building that would
facilitate these changes.
The design of the building creates more openness, he
argues. For example, the highest floors in the overhang won't be reserved
for CCTV's top management and instead will include public spaces such as a
canteen. (The building will have three major canteens that can feed 4,000
people at a time.) There will also be a public viewing deck with glass
floors so that visitors can see the vertigo-inducing overhang, as well as
corridors where they can peer into offices and television studios.
The building's loop "expresses a unity of a production
process, of what a media company can be. It isn't promoting isolationism but
connectivity," Mr. Scheeren says. -
2007 November 7 WALL
ST. JOURNAL
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