Delirious Beijing: CCTV by OMA and Urban Experiments in the 21st Century Chinese Capital

Written by Yue Zeng

Edited by Sarah Holley-Carner

Figure 1: The loop of CCTV. The Loop. In OMA Official Website. Accessed April 8, 2019.

Ideologies are born in the West, but only reach its maturity once they been transplanted in the East.

—Koolhaas in Beijing [1]

…the Skyline rises in the East.

—Rem Koolhaas [2]

I. Introduction

2018 marked the 40th anniversary of China’s economic reform. In the past four decades, this process has seen China on a track of rapid development comparable to none—by 2011, China had leapfrogged Japan to become the world's second-largest economy[3], and it has been foreseen that China will surpass the US to become the world’s biggest economy by 2030.[4] China’s economic triumph has found its spatial expression in the unprecedented process of urbanization of its capital, Beijing. In the first decade of 21st century, Beijing doubled in size twice,[5] with an average population growth of 0.33 million per year.[6]

The 2008 Olympics further accelerated Beijing’s transformation. The Olympics not only gave rise to some of the largest building projects in human history, which would become Beijing’s new architectural monuments, but they also intensified the city’s the global connectivity and largely redefined Beijing’s status [SH1] as China’s global city.[7]

With the flourishing construction market, Western architects have poured into Beijing to try their luck and stake their claims. The majority of projects that these foreign architects have worked on have been on a large scale—of national prominence or particularly challenging and complex—projects that appeal to adventurous architects seeking a prominent stage on which to perform.[8] Since 1998, in preparation for the Olympics, China announced a series of architectural competitions open worldwide for a number of mega-scaled, state-funded projects all over Beijing. The possibility of enriching the city with avant-garde architecture gave drew many big international firms and star architects.[9] Winners of these competitions include Paul Andreu (National Grand Theatre, 1999), Norman Foster (Beijing’s new airport 2001), Herzog and de Meuron (National Stadium, 2002), PTW (Water Cube, 2002) and OMA (China Central Television, abbr. CCTV, 2004).[10]

This paper examines the CCTV Headquarters designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA as one of the most experimental, yet controversial urban legacies left by the Games. The paper argues that the CCTV building can be viewed as the 21th century completion of Koolhaas’s imaginary Manhattan as illustrated in his 1978 work Delirious New York, which presents a delirious culture of congestion. Although CCTV attempts to propose a hyper-building typology as a solution to the fragmented mode of urbanism, criticism from home and abroad often undermines its social intentions. It is perceived merely as a work of the architects’ personal interest, which prevents it from becoming a successful prototype for cross-cultural avant-garde architectural practice.

II.  New York or Beijing?

To many people’s surprise, at the beginning of 21st century, Rem Koolhaas and OMA declined to enter the Ground Zero competition in New York but accepted the commission to design the new headquarter for the China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing.[SH2] [11] The New York project would have been the obvious choice—with Ground Zero, Koolhaas could have finally realized his imagination of Manhattan.[12] In his book Delirious New York (1978), Koolhaas imagines New York as the arena for the terminal stage of Western civilization.[13] He argues that since the 1850s, Manhattan has become a “mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle” due to the explosion of human density and the technological innovation in America.[14] The book describes an ideal stage of contemporary urbanism based on the delirious condition of Manhattan, or “Manhattan as conjecture.”[15] As an inversion of the classical idea that a manifesto aims to claim and control a non-existing future, Koolhaas proposes a “retroactive manifesto for Manhattan”: given that to live in a completely artificial world (i.e. to live in a fantasy) is what we secretly desire, what fuels our imagination is a vision of the city as a “paradigm for the exploitation of congestion,” a conscious state of urbanism charged by the splendors and mysteries generating from New York’s extremely high urban density.[16] I will argue that this “culture of congestion” is the theoretical root of the CCTV project.[17]

Figure 2: 1978 cover of Delirious New York Delirious New York. In OMA Official Website. Accessed April 8, 2019.

There were two main reasons for the architects to choose Beijing over New York. On one hand, the Ground Zero Project was centered around the memorial dedicated to 9/11, rather than something that could prove New York could be exciting again [18]. On the other hand, they felt that ultimately it was not different from the usual way of doing business in America. In an interview with Numéro Magazine, Koolhaas has expressed his frustration about the misalignment between OMA’s effort to create the hyper-dense urbanism and the fact that capitalism has made cities more fragmented in the West. In a typical Western scenario where every entrepreneurial decision is remotely dictated by the market, a company would put its departments and facilities in different parts of the town, according each department’s output value and the cost of land, to get the optimized profits [19]. Consequently, the city would end up being organized in a rather dispersed manner, which is the opposite of the congested urban condition Koolhaas pictured in the 1970s. Architecture, inevitably, would become the insulators between different functional zones of the city [20]. The fundamental thing that attracted the OMA architects was that at CCTV, all the facilities of making and producing TV programs could take place in the same location, which, according to Ole Scheeren, would be “simply unthinkable in the economic and psychological straitjackets of the West,”[21]. It was the promise that they can do something that cannot be done in the West—to bring back coherence, proximity, and a sense of community in a world increasingly subjected to the fragmentation of production processes and atomization of social realms—that drove them towards the CCTV project [22].

CCTV’s primary scheme, a loop that contains everything, is the most obvious expression of the utopian narratives of Delirious New York. On the chapter “The Double life of Utopia: The Skyscraper,” Koolhaas describes his ideological skyscraper as the combination of three parts: the reproduction of the site, the introduction of a tower, and the occupancy of the whole block. All of the three forms have their own weaknesses: the multiplication lacks meaning; the tower has meaning but its intention of isolation is limited by the location; the sole occupancy of the block does not make enough profits to support itself. However, when the three attributes ally with each other, the tower will give meaning to the multiplication; the multiplication will cast the metaphors on the ground floor; and the conquest of the block will assure the tower’s solitude as the sole occupant of its site lot. This combination will enable the building to accommodate different programs, making it a self-contained universe [23].

A program diagram (figure 1) made by OMA shows in CCTV all departments related to TV production are squeezed into one loop of interconnected activities [24]. According to the three attributes of the perfect skyscraper from Delirious New York, the loop can also be viewed as three parts: the plinth and base, adjacent to a ceremonial plaza, occupies the entire site in Beijing’s Central Business District; the two towers, leaning at 6 degrees toward each other crowned by a 75 m cantilever, give definition to the building as a skyscraper; looking down from the sky, the juxtaposition of all the floors projects the geometry of a square in plan, which echoes the contour of the site. In analogy to Koolhaas’s theory, the looping structure can synchronize the three existing forms of skyscrapers—the block, the tower, and the multiplication of the floor, thus it can overcome the drawbacks of each of the forms and give birth to a new building typology. It will become a hyper-building that creates a “truly three-dimensional experience,” [25].

The loop exists not only in the sense of the structure, but also in the organization of programs which means to have animpact on the behaviors of the employees [26]. The adjacency of all functions in one building can evoke an awareness of the co-workers’ activities and foster the dialogue between department entities, while a clear hierarchy is maintained between the managers and the workers. The general idea is to form a mutually dependent system where “the head knows where the hands are doing, and vice versa,” [27]. Accordingly, the 575,000 square meter loop is split into five divisions: administration, multi-business, news and broadcast, broadcasting transmission, and production. The administrative sections occupy the overhang of building, which is connected to both the news production and the multi-business towers,  giving directors and administrative staff direct access to their divisions [28]. On the ground level, production facilities form the common base towers, with lounges accommodating of actors, directors, and audiences [29]. All facilities spread throughout the building are joined and separated, when appropriate, by elevator groups and horizontal connections, woven into the network of a self-contained Utopia [30].

Figure 3: CCTV viewing from nearby residences, showing the grid pattern on the façade. CCTV Headquarters. In OMA Official Website. Accessed April 8, 2019. https://oma.eu/projects/cctv-headquarters.

Looking at the building, it is a form that is both vertical and horizontal, or neither one nor the other. A hybrid that cannot be defined by this mutual exclusivity. This quality might remind one of Manhattan, where urban verticality was invented, and where the crowning glory of that poetic heavenward orientation was epitomized in the two towers—which were felled by vicious horizontality [31]. Like the former World Trade Center, CCTV also comprises the theme of two bystanding towers, but the fragility of the slender towers has been fixed by lateral structures that brace the towers at the top and the bottom. The L-shaped overhang and the base provide firm supports to the towers against any external attacks, and they will reinforce the building’s structure greatly against seismic forces at the point of highest demand in earthquakes [32]. Looking in this light, the CCTV towers seemed to be Koolhaas’s reflection on the fallen WTC twins, casting shadows of the two souring towers in Lower Manhattan remotely on the land of Beijing: a twisted, contiguous version of the twin towers. The image of two towers laying down, inter-twined tumbling over each other can be also found on the original cover of Delirious New York, on which Koolhaas worked in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp. In this colorful illustration (figure 2), the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building are paired in a bed atop Manhattan’s urban grid, as if they were embracing each other and about to succumb to their latent sexual potency [33]. This is further evidence of the architect’s interpretation of New York’s metropolitan charisma as the counterpoint of extreme horizontality and verticality. When the vertical gesture of two skyscrapers combined with a horizontal coherence, the architecture would ultimately become something like a three-dimensional loop. Hence, it would probably not be a bold claim to say that the CCTV project brings Koolhaas’s early imagination of Manhattan to completion in Beijing. In a literal sense, the winding visage of the loop is a projection of the looming image of the twin towers, but the architect might also integrate some of his other impressions of New York to the design. The diagrid pattern that predominates the building’s façades (figure 3), for instance, can be visually connected to Manhattan’s famous city grid.

In its July 2005 issue, the Architecture and Urbanism magazine published an image of CCTV alongside the iconic American skyscrapers (figure 4), most of which are in New York including the no longer existing WTC towers, to show the building’s height in the American context [34]. Unsurprisingly, the building would fit in perfectly. Positioned next to the Sony Plaza and the Met Life building, both constructed between 1960-1980s, its size and height would look moderately appropriate in Manhattan, even though it looks enormous standing along Beijing’s lower skyline (figure 3). The building has little to do with the small-scaled traditional hutong residences of Beijing, or the low-rise soviet housing complexes constructed in the 20th century [35]. Somehow the building should have better been in New York, rather than Beijing.

This evokes a state of delirium of space and time. Physically, CCTV is in 21st century Beijing, but at least half of the building’s spirit belongs to the delirious New York dating back in the 1970s, where it finds its philosophical roots. Even if, by chance, the Chinese had the opportunity to bring it into reality, there is always a part of it calling Manhattan home. Koolhaas once said about CCTV, “it’s a building that only a European could think of, and only the Chinese could have built” [36], which is only partially true. The complete story is that it is a building imagined by a European, and built by the Chinese and the Americans. The Americans built it as a metaphor, and the Chinese projected the metaphor to the form of a skyscraper in reality.

III. Great Western cities 

Figure 4: CCTV standing with skyscrapers in USA. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press, 1994, 176.

Other than New York, CCTV is also able to pick up many formal characteristics from some of Koolhaas’s earlier works on Western cities, which are architecturally ambitious, though only in theory. For instance, the idea of “bigness”, a mega-structure to be placed over a central part of a metropolis, and the notion of separated movements are derived from the Exodus project in London (Figure 5). The project comprised tall barriers in a long strip to be placed over the central London that cut through the city’s historic urban fabric. The residents of London would then have to decide to whether live inside of the structure, in a luxurious life as prisoners, or outside, in a life of misery and deprivation, but with the freedom of movement [37]. The theme of an inside and outside joined together to form a contradictory entity was subsequently replicated in CCTV’s circulation scheme. The building comprises two parallel but not intersected loops—one for its staff and the other for the visitors. While employees can move freely mostly everywhere in the building, visitors will only be admitted to the one-way path circulating through key areas of television making, where what to display is strictly under control [38]. Similar notion of two opposite sides that run in parallel but never intersect can be also found in Koolhaas’s The Berlin Wall As Architecture project at AA [39].

In 2004, Rem Koolhaas noted in his book Context, “the skyline rises in the East,”[40]. In the past few decades, not only has the number of skyscrapers built in Asia has surpassed that of the United States, but Asian cities have also begun to replace the great Western cities such as New York, London, and Berlin to become the new testing fields for new urban philosophies and avant-garde architecture [41]. In the 1970s, New York was celebrated for its architectural constellation that gave birth to a delirious culture of congestion. But by the early twenty-first century, the financial melt-down in 2008 dealt a reversal of fortune for Western metropolises like New York and London. While these mighty cities struggle to retain their leading status, Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai have gained global recognition of their wealth and power by hosting mega-events such as the Olympics and the Expo. China has taken the pioneering role to explore new forms of urbanism and urban life [42]. The completion of CCTV implies this shift in the power dynamics between Western and Eastern cities.

IV. For Chinese capital, or for the Chinese capital?

Figure 5: Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. In SOCKS. Accessed April 8, 2019.

Since the beginning the project, CCTV has received an unparalleled amount of criticism from both sides of China and the West, revealing the chaotic aspect of an avant-gardearchitectural practice in a cross-cultural setting. From the various forms of neo-avant-gardism lasting from the 70s to the mid-90s, architecture has travelled some distance to accommodate itself to the present-day pragmatics of doing business [43]. Problems of intercultural understanding often emerge when there is a lack of mutual familiarity. Criticism also comes from home, as such foreign practices can be read as turning away from their home market and political beliefs. The Chinese argue that the foreign architects use the best conditions the country can supply, with both financial and political support, to fulfill their wildest design dreams as an act of selfishness and a waste of taxpayers' money. According to Wu Chen, the son of China's renowned architect Wu Liangyong, projects like CCTV emphasize strong visual impact over actual function, which has led to great engineering difficulties and huge costs. Also, the designs often do not harmonize with the surroundings of Chinese cities. Wu identifies the current domination by foreign architects as a new form of cultural colonialism, which could endanger the development of contemporary Chinese architecture [44]. Western media criticizes the architects’ involvement with CCTV (which functions, still, as the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party) as an act of ignorance to China’s records of human rights. Referring directly to the CCTV project, Ian Buruma described Koolhaas’s decision to build for the “center of state propaganda, the organ which tells a billion people what to think” as nothing short of “reprehensible,”[45]. One thing the West and China both criticize, however, is the integrity of the architects’ intentions. Even though Koolhaas had made it clear that he chose CCTV because he wanted to make the architecture for the public’s good [46], the public is generally more willing to be convinced that Koolhaas is the typical “gold miner” architect from the West, coming to China searching for easy money with little knowledge of the country’s culture and social customs. In Koolhaas in Beijing, Edzard Mik speaks about the endless condemnation of architects. “It appears to the eternal fate of architects to be tormented and harangued”, he writes [47]. In the post-ideological times, every pent-up desire finds an outlet in architecture.  It is not to say architecture should do bad, but the moral arguments are less convincing when architects have constantly become the targets of criticism.

V. Conclusion

To conclude, the CCTV Headquarters by OMA is a daring piece of experiment architecture realized by both the need of the state and the ambition of the star architects, as well as previous lines of research driven by the mega-event under special circumstances of 21st century China. Viewing from many angles, the building can be perceived as an architectural projection of Koolhaas’s fantasy of Manhattan. While the building’s looping scheme achieves the ideological form of the skyscraper described by Delirious New York, the image of the two interconnected towers is an improved version of New York’s World Trade Center. It is also evident that some ideas embodied by CCTV are transplanted from theoretical projects developed by Koolhaas in other Western cities previously. On a global horizon, CCTV is a witness to the transition of the delirious culture of congestion from the West to the East in the 21st century. A shadow of the great Western cities to a great extent, CCTV does not provide suitable solutions to China’s unique case of urbanism, though it has brought up some interesting topics (and controversies) for the years to come.

Endnotes

[1] Edzard Mik, Koolhaas in Beijing (Amsterdam: Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, 2010), 33.

[2] Aihwa Ong, "Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global," Worlding Cities, July 14, 2011, 1, doi:10.1002/9781444346800.

[3] Julia Kollewe and Justin McCurry, "China Overtakes Japan as World's Second-largest Economy," The Guardian, February 14, 2011, accessed April 06, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/14/china-second-largest-economy.

[4] Simon Kennedy and Bloomberg News, "China Will Overtake the U.S. Economy in Less than 15 Years, Says HSBC, Challenging Trump's Claim," Financial Post, September 25, 2018, accessed April 06, 2019, https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/china-will-overtake-the-u-s-in-less-than-15-years-hsbc-says.

[5] Carol Carol Rasmussen, "Beijing Quadrupled in Size in a Decade, New Study Finds," GeoSpace, June 29, 2015, accessed April 06, 2019, https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2015/06/29/beijing-quadrupled-in-size-in-a-decade-new-study-finds/.

[6] Yan Du, "改革开放40年北京常住人口平均每年增加33.3万人," Chinanews.com, November 01, 2018, accessed April 06, 2019, http://www.chinanews.com/wap/detail/zw/sh/2018/11-01/8665966.shtml.

[7] Xuefei Ren, "Olympic Beijing: Reflections on Urban Space and Global Connectivity," The International Journal of the History of Sport 26, no. 8 (June 24, 2009): 1011, accessed April 5, 2019, doi:10.1080/09523360902904751.

[8] Xin Lu, China China ...: Western Architects and City Planners in China (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 23.

[9] Claudio Greco and Carlo Maria Santoro, Beijing: The New City (Milano: Skira, 2008), 97-101.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, CCTV by OMA (Tokyo: Architecture and Urbanism, 2005), 10.

[12] Edzard Mik, Koolhaas in Beijing (Amsterdam: Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, 2010), 28.

[13] "Delirious New York," OMA Official Website, accessed April 07, 2019, https://oma.eu/publications/delirious-new-york.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 10-11.

[16] Kristina Riegert, Staffan Ericson, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 172-173.

[17] Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 10.

[18] Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Köln: König, 2006), 6.

[19] Abid.

[20] Koolhaas et al., CCTV by OMA, 5.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] "Reading Notes of Delirious New York," 豆瓣, January 19, 2010, accessed April 08, 2019, https://www.douban.com/note/57379758/.

[24] Koolhaas et al., CCTV by OMA, 38-39.

[25] Riegert et al, Media Houses, 168-169.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 38-39.

[28] Ibid, 50.

[29] Ibid, 44.

[30] Ibid, 98.

[31] Mik, Koolhaas in Beijing, 33.

[32] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 105.

[33] Mik, Koolhaas in Beijing, 33.

[34] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 176.

[35] Greco et al., Beijing, 31-77.

[36] Hugh Pearman, "Why We Need Rem Koolhaas," RIBAJ, accessed April 08, 2019, https://www.ribaj.com/culture/why-we-need-rem-koolhaas.

[37] Riegert et al, Media Houses, 171-172.

[38] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 84-97.

[39] Riegert et al, Media Houses, 171.

[40] Ong, Worlding Cities, 1.

[41] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 4.

[42] Ibid.

[43]Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of managerialism: OMA, CCTV, And the Post-political (Routledge: 2014), 2.

[44] Ren, Olympic Beijing, 1032.

[45] Ian Buruma, "Ian Buruma: China Is Not Squeaky Clean," The Guardian, July 30, 2002, accessed April 08, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/30/china.features11.

[46] Koolhaas et al, CCTV by OMA, 84-97.

[47] Mik, Koolhaas in Beijing, 40.