Design Observer has a neat article about Rem Koolhaas and his CCTV building in Beijing. I’m on record — as much as this blog serves as record — as saying that there’s no goddamn way that building is going to stand up. But evidently it’s at 14 stories and rising.
Anyway, the article discusses Koolhaas’ wacky theorizing vis-a-vis designing such a massive structure in China. The writer, William Drenttel, launches some harsh criticisms of Koolhaas, as we see here, in an excerpt from K’s Beijing Manifesto (in italics) and Drenttel’s followup:
In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department — the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera — talks about the others as “themâ€Â; distrust is rife, motives are questioned. But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence  a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.
It’s one thing to build the building. But isn’t Koolhaas sounding like an apologist for the corruption and extreme capitalism of Beijing? His manifesto seems to embrace the language of Mao for a media conglamerate that is one of the the great powers in the People’s Republic of China, and the source of much of the censorship in that country. According to Koolhaas’s thesis of Forward Compatibility: “China is characterized by the need to spread opportunity and information rather than protect manufacturers and other established interests. It could use its dominant position, the force of its numbers, its economic power, and its central government to lead the world into a digital future.” What would lead an architect of Rem Koolhaas’s standing to voice such propaganda? Perhaps Koolhaas is simply taking advantage of the pervasive authoritarianism that is still the Chinese norm. Design approvals? No problem, when everyone serves at the pleasure of the Party! He almost seems to be luxuriating in the absence of the nuisance of the free market.
“Lead the world into the digital future”? Maybe Koolhaas could try typing “tibet democracy” into a search engine in a Beijing internet cafe and see how that central government perceives the digital future.
Anyway, Drenttel condemns the building for using so damn much steel, which appears to be the only way that the thing is going to beat my prediction of tipping over in a stiff wind:
CCTV, at only 55 stories, requires 123,750 tons of steel for 4.8 million square feet of space, or 51 lbs/sq. ft. of steel [compared to 31 lbs/sq. ft. for the Twin Towers]. The punch line is that CCTV is the architectural equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV. A structural engineer might talk about pounds of steel per square foot as a measure of a building’s structural efficiency. CCTV has a beautiful structural design considering what it is required to do, but any engineer, I believe, would describe it as a “heavy” building. By comparison, the World Trade Towers were a super tall, extreme structure and they were still 40% lighter than CCTV. There is a lot of extra steel (20 to 30 lbs/sf) in the CCTV structure simply to resist overturning because of the weight and stress of its free-floating bridge, even assuming contemporary code and seismic requirements.
The issue is simple: all this steel is there to support a design conceit, albeit a beautiful one, of “an eye catching megastructure which looks like it ought to fall over.” Rory McGowan, the ARUP director of the collaborating structural engineers, “admits that the structural gymnastics have a purely aesthetic justification.”
Getting back to my point about that digital future (and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through), I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many major projects are going to China and places like Dubai, where there’s huge money and an authoritarian government. It must be a joy for architects to work in that environment, at least as much as they can gratify their “creative impulses” without getting derailed by local zoning boards. Of course, the buildings aren’t in a vacuum, and architects can decide how much they’ll take into account the regional politics that enable their personal freedom.
(Bonus VM tie-in: Just as this morning’s Montaigne selection helped characterize my own, um, peculiarities in communication, a quote from the article about Koolhaas’ architecture helped sum up the Gil Roth Experience: “raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating.”)