Koolhaas’s CCTV Building Fits Beijing as City of the Future - Review - NYTimes.com 8/2/11 12:17 PM HOME PAGE TODAY'S PAPER VIDEO MOST POPULAR TIMES TOPICS Subscribe: Digital / Home Delivery Welcome, margaretsegalla Log Out Help Search All NYTimes.com Art & Design WORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYLE TRAVEL JOBS REAL ESTATE AUTOS ART & DESIGN BOOKS DANCE MOVIES MUSIC TELEVISION THEATER VIDEO GAMES ARCHITECTURE REVIEW Log in to see what your friends Log In With Facebook Koolhaas, Delirious in Beijing are sharing on nytimes.com. Privacy Policy | What’s This? What’s Popular Now The Tea Party’s Putting an War on America Antebellum Myth About Slave Families to Rest Philippe Ruault The CCTV building in Beijing, the headquarters of China Central Television designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, has a contorted form that frames an enormous void at its center. By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF Published: July 11, 2011 BEIJING — Aside from the new World Trade Center, it’s hard to RECOMMEND think of a more contentious architectural project in the last few TWITTER Advertise on NYTimes.com years than the CCTV building, the headquarters of China Central COMMENTS Television here. (162) TicketWatch: Theater Offers by E-Mail E-MAIL Sign up for ticket offers from Broadway shows and other advertisers. After Rem Koolhaas, the project’s PRINT [email protected] architect — along with his former Change E-mail Address | Privacy Policy Multimedia SINGLE PAGE Beijing partner, Ole Scheeren — REPRINTS unveiled the design in 2003 he was pilloried by Western journalists for SHARE MOST E-MAILED RECOMMENDED FOR YOU glorifying a propaganda organ of the articles in the past Chinese government. Several years 9 month later a fire at the site nearly burned [email protected] All Recommendations Interactive Graphic down a neighboring building, also Architectural Monuments in a designed by Mr. Koolhaas, landing the director of the 1. ESSAY Reshaped Beijing Who Falls to Addiction, and Who Is project and 19 others in prison for negligence and Unscathed? significantly delaying construction. 2. F.B.I. Investigates Assaults Near Michigan Campus Related And then there’s something about the building’s Architecture: In Changing Face of appearance that seems to unsettle people. Just when Beijing, a Look at the New China 3. Arts Outposts Stung by Cuts in State Aid http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/design/koolhaass-cctv-building-fits-beijing-as-city-of-the-future.html?emc=eta1 Page 1 of 4 Koolhaas’s CCTV Building Fits Beijing as City of the Future - Review - NYTimes.com 8/2/11 12:17 PM Beijing, a Look at the New China 3. Arts Outposts Stung by Cuts in State Aid (July 13, 2008) things got back on track after the fire, a Chinese critic published an article saying that the building’s contorted Embracing Koolhaas’s Friendly Skyscraper (November 16, 2006) form, which frames an enormous void at its center, was 4. Eugene McDaniels, Singer-Songwriter of Soul and Blues, Dies at 76 Times Topic: Rem Koolhaas modeled on a pornographic image of a naked woman on her hands and knees. The piece ignited a storm of negative press, forcing Mr. Koolhaas to issue a denial. 5. Kenny Baker, Fiddler Steeped in Bluegrass Blog Style, Dies at 85 ArtsBeat The latest on the Yet for all that, the CCTV headquarters may be the 6. arts, coverage of Paul Franke, Ubiquitous Singer at the Met, greatest work of architecture built in this century. Mr. Dies at 93 live events, critical reviews, multimedia Koolhaas, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, has extravaganzas and always been interested in making buildings that expose 7. Drug Kingpin Wanted in U.S. Is Held in much more. Join the discussion. the conflicting energies at work in society, and the CCTV Mexico More Arts News building is the ultimate expression of that aim, beginning 8. Elmer Lower, Former President of ABC Enlarge This Image with the slippery symbolism of its exterior. At moments News, Dies at 98 monumental and combative, at others strangely elusive, almost retiring, it is one of the most beguiling and 9. Fran Landesman, Lyricist With a Bittersweet Edge, Dies at 83 powerful works I’ve seen in a lifetime of looking at architecture. 10. Richard F. Pedersen, Cold War Era Diplomat, Dies at 86 What grabs the imagination as much as anything is the Courtesy of Rem Koolhaas The building functions as a statement vision the building offers of this particular period in Go to Your Recommendations » about China’s headlong race into the history. Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent What’s This? | Don’t Show future. architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world Readers’ Comments at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era Readers shared their thoughts much as the great works of the early Modernists did on this article. theirs. Read All Comments (162) » Mr. Koolhaas has been one of architecture’s most influential thinkers since the late 1970s, when his book “Delirious New York” offered a celebration of the “culture of congestion” in Manhattan at a time when many middle-class New Yorkers were still fleeing to the suburbs. The critter people ALSO IN VIDEO » Over the next few decades he established himself as both an architect of extraordinary Fast blueberry jam talent and the profession’s reigning enfant terrible. His 1997 competition entry for an I now pronounce you ... expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, which would have sunk the museum’s beloved sculpture garden into the ground and stowed curators in a tower labeled MoMA Inc., enraged many people at that institution but could well have reinvigorated an institution ADVERTISEMENTS struggling to reimagine its identity. The 2004 Seattle Central Library, an uneven stack of slabs shrink-wrapped in a glass-and-steel web, was at once an evocative memorial to the Exclusive offers delivered to your inbox conventional library and a monument to the new Information Age. Mr. Koolhaas was offered the CCTV commission in late 2002, around the time he was invited to participate in redevelopment plans for ground zero in Lower Manhattan, and he immediately decided he could not take on both. “It was a matter of focus,” he said. By then the redevelopment plans at ground zero had become so politically and emotionally heated that Mr. Koolhaas was skeptical that anything of real architectural value could be produced there. CCTV had its own problems; for one, its construction was widely seen as part of a huge public relations campaign in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games here. But Mr. Koolhaas was fascinated by Beijing’s mix of ancient hutongs, Stalinist-era workers’ housing and 1960s megastructures. And unlike New York, an aging city that was becoming increasingly nostalgic, Beijing was in the midst of a major modernization http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/design/koolhaass-cctv-building-fits-beijing-as-city-of-the-future.html?emc=eta1 Page 2 of 4 Koolhaas’s CCTV Building Fits Beijing as City of the Future - Review - NYTimes.com 8/2/11 12:17 PM push. “I was aware of negative developments there, of course,” Mr. Koolhaas said. “But on the whole there was also an incredible sense of change at that moment. There was a real desire to improve things, especially in Beijing.” No building has since done more to burnish the reputation of Beijing as a city of the future than Koolhaas’s. His CCTV building, nearing completion, has been a highly visible Advertise on NYTimes.com part of the cityscape in this nation’s capital since late in the last decade, rising across an elevated freeway from the generic towers of Beijing’s new business district. Its two 50- Ads by Google what's this? story legs, which house offices and production studios, are joined at the top by a 13-story bridge whose angled form juts out precariously over a plaza. Free Uruguay Fact Sheet For people considering Investing, The more time you spend with it, the harder it is to pin the building down. The legs, Visiting, or Living in Uruguay which taper as they rise to slightly different heights, distort your normal sense of www.InternationalLiving.com/Uruguay perspective, and Mr. Koolhaas represses all the most obvious signs of human scale, like the repetitive windows and floor slabs of a conventional tower. From a distance it’s virtually impossible to get a grip on the building’s size — an apt metaphor for the way giant media companies like CCTV have collapsed the scale of our world. Approaching from the direction of the freeway, with the massive bridge looming directly ahead, the building can look dark and menacing. From another angle the legs seem almost fragile. And from yet another the bridge’s tilted roof gives the building a strangely two-dimensional quality. 1 2 NEXT PAGE » This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: July 15, 2011 An architecture review and two picture captions on Wednesday about the CCTV building in Beijing, the headquarters of China Central Television, omitted one of the architects. Besides Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren also designed the building. A version of this review appeared in print on July 13, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Koolhaas, Delirious In Beijing. COMMENTS (162) E-MAIL PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS Get 50% Off The New York Times & Free All Digital Access. More Headlines From Around the Web Get Free E-mail Alerts on These Topics Sponsored Links CARING.COM Architecture 5 Things Not to Say to Someone Who's Trying to Quit Smoking China Central Television IVILLAGE Koolhaas, Rem Zsa Zsa Gabor is Becoming a Mom Again at 94! Is That Even Legal? Beijing (China) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/design/koolhaass-cctv-building-fits-beijing-as-city-of-the-future.html?emc=eta1 Page 3 of 4 Koolhaas’s CCTV Building Fits Beijing as City of the Future - Review - NYTimes.com 8/2/11 12:17 PM CNBC Most Expensive Hotel Rooms MAKINGOF.COM "I don't watch television except for Family Guy".