July 11, 2011

Koolhaas, Delirious in Beijing By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

BEIJING — Aside from the new World Trade Center, it’s hard to think of a more contentious architectural project in the last few years than the CCTV building, the headquarters of China Central Television here.
After Rem Koolhaas, the project’s architect — along with his former Beijing partner, Ole Scheeren — unveiled the design in 2003 he was pilloried by Western journalists for glorifying a propaganda organ of the Chinese government. Several years later a fire at the site nearly burned down a neighboring building, also designed by Mr. Koolhaas, landing the director of the project and 19 others in prison for negligence and significantly delaying construction.
And then there’s something about the building’s appearance that seems to unsettle people. Just when things got back on track after the fire, a Chinese critic published an article saying that the building’s contorted form, which frames an enormous void at its center, was 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.
Yet for all that, the CCTV headquarters may be the greatest work of architecture built in this century. Mr. Koolhaas, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, has always been interested in making buildings that expose the conflicting energies at work in society, and the CCTV building is the ultimate expression of that aim, beginning with the slippery symbolism of its exterior. At moments monumental and combative, at others strangely elusive, almost retiring, it is one of the most beguiling and powerful works I’ve seen in a lifetime of looking at architecture.
What grabs the imagination as much as anything is the vision the building offers of this particular period in history. Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era much as the great works of the early Modernists did theirs.
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.
Over the next few decades he established himself as both an architect of extraordinary talent and the profession’s reigning enfant terrible. His 1997 competition entry for an 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 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 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 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 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-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.
The more time you spend with it, the harder it is to pin the building down. The legs, which taper as they rise to slightly different heights, distort your normal sense of 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.
These distortions are reinforced by the structural system, an irregular network of steel cross-bracing that looks as if it were etched into the building’s skin. Because the cross-bracing becomes denser where the stresses are most severe — for example, where the bridge connects to the towers — at certain points the structure seems to be straining against all odds to stay up.
The forms are a reworking of classical perspective; the irregular structure is an attack on Modernist ideas about structural purity. Both are an effort to break down what Mr. Koolhaas, like a number of other architects of his generation, sees as the oppressiveness of the Cartesian order that has shaped architecture for centuries. The design is also striving to make room for the impurities and imperfections that make us human.
Mr. Koolhaas, of course, also had to deal with the mundane issues of how the building works. It is raised on a concrete plinth, contributing to a sense that it is a monolithic world, disconnected from the life of the city. But that impression changes once you walk inside.
The main lobby, in a low structure at the base of one of the towers, is classic Koolhaas: a montage of colliding forms. Light pours in through big rhomboid-shaped skylights. Walls tilt on two sides, creating a slight sense of compression that nudges you forward. A walkway in front of you cuts across the room toward the elevator banks. Stepping onto it, you look down several stories into a vertiginous underworld of escalators, beams and bridges.
The view is startling, not least because it undermines the impression of CCTV as a walled compound. Every morning a subway station will disgorge thousands of workers who will climb the escalators up to the lobby, passing through a security barrier and a row of 50-foot-tall yellow travertine pillars, to the elevators beyond.
A separate entry to one side of the lobby leads down a wide staircase to an exhibition space for tourists and other visitors. Above the stair, a glass-enclosed V.I.P. lounge overlooks the lobby. Another staircase leads up to a garden on the plaza for employees. People in these spaces will be in constant eye contact with one another, although they will rarely mix.
The limited interaction of disparate social groups becomes far more limited higher in the building. The doors that separate executives from their underlings are as firmly shut as they would be in any Western corporation. The director’s office, a sequence of spacious rooms clad in more yellow travertine, comes equipped with a plush apartment. Executives lunching in the V.I.P. dining room — a spectacular space braced by heavy steel columns — can stare up through a big skylight at other V.I.P.’s landing on a helipad.
And public access to the building will be limited to what Mr. Koolhaas calls “the loop”: a sequence of exhibition spaces, restaurants and viewing areas that climb up one tower, cross the bridge and descend the other.
At one point you end up at a public observation deck, a cavernous room crisscrossed with beams and columns at the angle of the bridge. Three big round windows are cut into the deck’s floor, with views down to the employees’ garden. Seen from here, the garden turns out to be a blown-up version of Piranesi’s 18th-century map of an imaginary Rome from his engraving series “Il Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma.” The map represents an urban ideal, one in which the greatness of cities is seen to arise from a clash of architectural visions built up over centuries, and where each of these visions is given equal weight.
In its allusion to a vital city built from the ruins of a once mighty empire, the garden is an obvious allegory for China. Mr. Koolhaas seems to be reminding us that all empires fade; it is the cultural triumphs — including the great buildings — that will remain the most enduring testament to who we were and what we hoped to become.

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.