bricworks3 the watercube post-olympics ai weiwei - ARCHILEPSY ...

CCTV HEADQUARTERS > Beijing : China
> Foreign street presence
There is an all-too-common
axiom of architectural
design that resignedly states:
“everything has been done before.”
Rem Koolhaas must have had his
iPod cranked up when that insipid
declaration was muttered. Ascending
from the relentless mid-rise sprawl
of Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road Central
Business District, a remarkably novel
form bears testament to OMA’s
pioneering culture of invention. When
other architects were plundering the
Chinese building boom by pursuing
an inexorable obsession with “taller,
higher, phallic-ier”, Koolhaas and
Partner-in-Charge Ole Scheeren were
busy designing an iconic and genuinely
unique symbol of China’s warp-speed
modernization.
Ineloquently dubbed “Big Shorts”
by locals, the 54-storey headquarters
for China Central Television forms
a gigantic angular loop in the sky,
savvy designers
culminating in a dramatic gravitydefying
75 meter cantilever. Like
so many of OMA's script-flipping
designs, the monumental loop was
originally conceived as an innovative
interpretation of the program. In their
own words: "CCTV consolidates
all its operations in a continuous
flow, allowing each worker to be
permanently aware of her colleagues
– a chain of interdependence that
promotes solidarity rather than
isolation, collaboration instead of
opposition."
Although the project was awarded
to OMA over a decade ago (which is
practically a century ago in Chinese-
"IT COMES ACROSS SOMETIMES
AS BIG AND SOMETIMES AS
SMALL, AND FROM SOME
ANGLES IT IS STRONG AND
FROM OTHERS WEAK"
" I had the fantasy that the façade would
disappear against the gray sky and you
would be left with only the black grid"
-Ole Scheeren
> Complex structural bracing
creates patterned facade.
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