Absurdity, Allegory and China

I finally went to Beijing at the end of this past week (March 12 & 13, 2009) and, unsurprisingly, spent some time around the East Third Ring Rd. photographing the CCTV project. I’d received a phone call a week or two ago to tell me that a high fence was being erected around the spectacular wreckage of the TVCC (Television Culture Center), aka Mandarin Oriental Beijing, and true enough, it was as high (est: five-stories) as the one that has been permanently around it’s more popular partner in propaganda production, the leaning towers of CCTV. No longer are there any views from the corner of Chaoyang Lu south to the new Jintaixizhao subway entrance. Is the erection of the new wall to hide great secrets or is it from sheer embarrassment on the part of the CCTV officials who are not (yet?) in jail? My guess is that it is more the latter, although prior to the fire I would have bet that it was impossible to embarrass anyone from CCTV. A quick flip through the channels at any time of day is testament to their utter shamelessness. But I guess torching your own building on an auspicious evening, Yuan Xiao Jie, and, through sheer insolence, incompetency and total disregard of civil law, turning a nearly completed landmark building into the world’s largest Roman candle is enough to even flush the cheeks of the China Central Television people. It makes me, if only for a moment, lean in the direction of believing in miracles, but then I get my balance and realize that life is full of the unexpected.

There are many misfortunes attached to this disaster, the most obvious and greatest being the death of a firefighter. But the ripple effect continues to claim more victims. One group that has been dramatically impacted is the Mandarin Oriental Hotel management staff, some of whom have been in Beijing for the past two years; most have already left or are in the process of leaving. And in the midst of the economic sinkhole that is swallowing the world, the prospects for their future cannot be rosy. But despite the hardships that have befallen some, a story in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week points towards the schadenfreude factor: China luxury hotel glut too much of a good thing.

“You had so many new hotels opening in the Olympic lead-up and even afterward. [Even] if it was business as usual, and we didn’t have a financial crisis, this would have been a tough year,” said Damien Little, a director of the hotel consulting company Horwath Asia Pacific. His company counted 126 hotel openings in Beijing last year, adding 29,000 rooms. Hotels that missed their deadlines for completion are still opening.
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Perhaps the only relief for Beijing’s beleaguered hotel industry is that the most feared competitor, the Mandarin Oriental, will not open anytime soon. The unopened hotel, in the China Central Television compound co-designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, was gutted in a fire last month.

“Nobody wants to say it, but that’s one less hotel,” Little said

Below are a few photos. Click to see larger versions. More photos  from the this week here. And a lot more from the last fifteen months here.

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Alex Pasternack, who has written often and well on CCTV project, has recently posted the following piece that is well worth the read: In the Ashes of Rem Koolhaas’s TVCC, a Chance for Revision?

While it is tempting to discount projects like CCTV as a kind of architectural provocation, I don’t think Koolhaas and his brethren are a cynical bunch. Quite the contrary, Koolhaas sees the CCTV as a radical approach not just to high-rise architecture but to using architecture to introduce more openness into the state’s apparatus.