I have mentioned several times in the past that in the land of little news, rumors – once they’ve reached some unspecified critical mass – have a way of muscling in, for better or worse, and commanding attention until they are either dispelled or deemed true enough to be spun into fool’s gold. This one’s pretty specific when it comes to positing a time: “tomorrow,” which happens to be today. A quick trip over to the site will be enough to find out the truth of it, though there’s nothing to say that it won’t be tomorrow, next week, or never.

I have heard many rumors concerning this project that I have reflexively blown off. The proof, as always, is in the building. The architectural critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, when asked in an interview about dogma and  and theories answered, “I discount the theories and look at the building,” which is also good advice when addressing rumors. I have heard too many concerning the CCTV Building, two of the most recent being that the interior work on the iconic building is being done on the cheap (not surprising if it turns out to be true, given what I can only imagine is a staggering cost overrun for the entire project, due in great part to CCTV burning down the little brother of the complex), and that CCTV is looking for a buyer, as they try to distance themselves from their eponymous, though dead-in-water, flagship.  Is their any truth to any of these rumors? I have no idea, though they are believable at some level – especially the lack of quality of the interior work if the project is, in fact, on the auction block. If CCTV were actually able to pawn it off, who would/could possibly buy it? There are so many problems attached to this possibility that I am not going to go down this road more than a single step: What would a new name do to the building’s global high profile and everyone attached to it, given the fact that it is still one of the great architectural works of the fledgling 21st century? Rumor-generated questions of this sort are interesting to play with, though not worth spending too much time with until a for sale sign appears on the strange beanie of a helo deck, which will happen when hell freezes over, allowing George Steinbrenner an opportunity to skate (apologies to Bill “Spaceman” Lee).

I am not about to skate onto the thin ice of What is architecture and what isn’t?, but Goldberger is a great place for anyone to begin to understand how to answer this question. Though I have only just begun reading this book, it has already sent me off on any number of tangential searches. In the first page of the introduction he gets right to it: “You could say that architecture is what happens when people build with an awareness that they are doing something that reaches at least a little bit beyond the practical.” Simple, yes, but that allows me to look with a keener eye and question what I see out my window here in Beijing.

This morning at the top of the China Daily website the headline that caught my eye was ‘Most homes’ to be demolished in 20 years.

More than half of China’s existing residential structures will be demolished and rebuilt in the coming 20 years, according to a senior researcher from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, a claim that has sparked fresh questions about the short lifespan of Chinese buildings.

Chen Huai, director of the policy research center at the ministry, was quoted on Friday by Southern Metropolis Daily as saying that homes built before 1999 will be dismantled to make way for new development during the next two decades. Chen said some historical relics that deserve protection will be spared the wrecking ball.

I won’t even attempt to address the “historical relics that deserve protection” qualifier, though it is abundantly clear that China’s historical residential architecture in its various vernacular forms, is only included if: 1) someone very close to Heaven did something heavenly while they lived there – though anymore Heaven’s no guarantee; or 2) developers just haven’t gotten to that neighborhood yet – though if you live in one, new or old, you can bet they will be coming.

But both experts and industry watchers have questioned the rapid speed of demolition and reconstruction, suggesting poor building practices and a lack of consistent urban planning, along with a blind pursuit of economic gain on the part of developers, are the real reasons for the relatively short lifespan of buildings.

I keep thinking that at some point a housing market with a physical half-life of a decade can’t possibly sustainable itself, and that somewhere hidden deep within the vaults is The Book of Actual Acountability – currently classified as a state secret – that will eventually show up on Wikileaks and expose the shell game nature of this fraud. A country perpetually Under Construction will eventually have to pay the piper, no matter that the tune will be disconcertingly off-key.

The article also goes on to note that “the average life expectancy of a building in Britain is 132 years and they last around 74 years in the United States,” and that “[i]n China, construction waste comprises 30 to 40 percent of the total volume of urban waste.”

If, as Goldberger suggests, “The way a community builds tells you, sometimes, all you need to know about it’s values,” then what can we say about a system that needs to tear down it’s houses after twenty years?  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that that this is not what “sustainability” is supposed to look like.
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For another good, frank article on low quality construction in China from the China Daily see, Poor construction quality keeps foreign property buyers away which I mentioned a few months ago here.

We asked the world’s leading architects, critics, and deans of architecture schools two questions: what are the five most important buildings, bridges, or monuments constructed since 1980, and what is the greatest work of architecture thus far in the 21st century?

A closer look at the ballots show that the wording was slightly different.

1) My choices [5] for the most important buildings, monuments, or bridges completed since 1980:
2) My choice for the most significant work of architecture created so far in the 21st century:

Though constructed implies completed, completed is a degree more final, suggesting accomplishment, as in mission accomplished.

A closer look at the individual ballots shows that Beijing fared pretty well, with two buildings included in both ballots. The Bird’s Nest received two (2) votes under category 1, while tallying seven (7) under category 2, the highest number of votes of any “architecture created in the 21st century.”

The other Beijing building that received votes in the balloting was the CCTV Building (not the entire project), which received two (2) votes under category 2, the same category that the Bird’s Nest won. What is odd is that the CCTV Building also received three (3) votes under the category 1 “for the most important buildings, monuments, or bridges completed since 1980.” The three votes came from architects Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss and Wold D. Prix. The rub is, of course, that the CCTV has not been completed, and is not expected to be completed until sometime next year. Though the exterior is seemingly complete, the interior is still in the process of being finished, and the CCTV staff is still not commuting to Civilized Chaoyang (here and here). Splitting hairs? No, I don’t think so. If it were complete it would be operating as the state-run TV headquarter’s loop. But it is still behind multi-story billboards with workers still reporting everyday fitting it out. Someone ought to tell Mr. Gehry et al.

Gehry ended up with the most mentions in the survey. For more see Architecture in the Age of Gehry, which mentions that the CCTV Building is still under construction. Of the 90 people asked to participate in the survey, only 52 actually submitted their ballots. Koolhaas was not one of them, which is not surprising.

It's 2010! Call home!

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For more on the Vanity Fair article and Frank Gehry see Charlie Rose’s interview with Matt Tyrnauer, the author of the VF piece, which also includes of very moving clip of Philip Johnson’s visit with Frank Gehry to Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

I never dreamed that this project (the buildings as well as my personal tracking of it) would still be in progress nearly halfway through 2010. Though I have no privileged revelations on an actual deadline, I can easily imagine that it will continue for at least another year. When I was there nearly three (3) weeks ago I was surprised that there was so little on-site activity. I was in Beijing last weekend on other business, and though I didn’t take any photos of the project, I did pass by it on Saturday afternoon and saw that the crane in the four b&w photos below is now above the TVCC roof line. Next month we will move to Beijing, which will make it easier to document the changes that are, no doubt, imminently about to happen. Though I’ve heard – as everyone else has also heard – that the TVCC will be reconstructed, the lack of activity is stymying. What I can imagine is that since the fire there have been colossal negotiations between who knows how many parties. Though I believe that it will be rebuilt – I’ve been saying this from just a few days after the fire – what I’ve learned after years in China is that you never know what will actually happen until after it has happened, and even then there’s a very good chance that you still won’t know what just happened. Somewhere there is a chengyu that states this much more succinctly.

At any rate, here are several photos I shot in the late afternoon of April 23^rd. (Click for larger photo).

For a more obsessive listing of photos from this project you can check out my CCTV HQ Bldg set at Flickr.

CCTV project from the east end of the Kerry Centre

There is a perennial incompleteness that haunts mainland Chinese cities, second and third tier cities as well as the nation’s capital. In the foreground of the above photo you can see scaffolding, green construction mesh,  and the top of a tent where migrant workers live in the very heart of the Central Business District, across the East Third Ring Road from one of the landmark architectural projects in Beijing, which itself was rendered “incomplete” when the clients, CCTV (China Central Television) set their building (left), the TVCC, on fire in February 2009 during an illegal fireworks display a few short months before the opening of the building as the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The fire was responsible for the death of a firefighter and disruption of hundreds of lives, and the sparking of a spectacular corruption case that has seen many hauled off to jail. (Yesterday the China Daily reported that two-and-a-half months after the beginning of the fire trial twenty (20) people “have received jail terms ranging from three to seven years.” Xu Wei, the former head of construction was given the stiffest sentence and was also pinned with the sole responsibility of ordering the catastrophic and fatal fireworks display.)

In the foreground of the photo is a small square at the east end of the Kerry Center, one of the prime five-star hotels in Beijing. It’s as if no one can quite make up their mind as to what the final product is supposed to actually look like, so the decision is made to do it all over again. This particular site has been in a state of constant construction or repair for at least three years (and if my memory was a bit better I could probably add a few more years to that total), cluttering a space that could very well be left alone and allowed to evolve into a niche of quiet sanity in the midst of all the frenzy, a place to sit and watch the reconstruction of the TVCC. Is this an issue of indecisveness, poor quality construction or both?

In this photo the white crane in front of the TVCC is in the process of being raised, which I assume has something to do with the renovation from the extensive fire damage, as it has been reported that the building will be reconstructed and serve – sometime in the unspecified future – as a hotel as per the original plan.

Last month the China Daily ran an interview with Ashley Howlett, a construction lawyer who “leads the Greater China construction practice as a partner with Jones Day in Beijing,” entitled Poor construction quality keeps foreign property buyers away. It is a particularly critical assessment of construction in Beijing and, by extension, all of China. Anyone who has lived in China for more than a week is able to understand Howlett’s appraisal of the lack of quality that should scare off anyone with the least thought of buying residential or commercial property.

The quickly built but cheaply made buildings in Beijing will not literally fall down, but will deteriorate. Wall paint will peel and elevators won’t work. Buildings will become uncomfortable because they will not have been properly maintained. That’s when people will start to realize they’ve paid a lot of money to buy a place in the Central Business District and they’ve paid management charges, but nothing works and everything looks really poor. But the developers will probably be long gone by then, so I’m not sure what people will do.

Many buildings in Beijing are built with the cheapest materials available, which tend to degrade quickly. This is a worryingly common phenomenon. There are many buildings here that appear as if they are 10 or 15 years old, but are really just five years old. That’s a little bit sad.

This is the main reasons why there is a persistent, unfinished appearance to so many projects in high profile neighborhoods that seem to be permanently under construction. Most (though not all) places that are not wrapped in the construction shroud are in the process of high-speed decay. My default response to seeing a quiet neighborhood is to wonder how long it will be before major renovation commences or, as is happening far too often, demolition will begin.

I am not qualified to judge what this means economically, though it seems like a plan to keep migrant workers employed. How long this can be afforded or tolerated is just a matter of time. As homeowners watch the inevitable depreciation of their investments I can only imagine that they will not be happy. I also imagine that this has already commenced.

When I first moved to China a dozen years ago we lived in a building that had sewer gas problems of biblical proportions. Our building was not an anomaly. When I asked about a simple plumbing J trap it was as if I were asking a science fiction question. My conclusion was that the entire Chinese indoor plumbing system had been turned over to people who had never used such a thing. If you had seen construction sites back in the late 1990s you would understand how I’d come to that conclusion: workers slept in the open spaces they were building, and each construction site had it’s own kitchen as well as shallow latrine. Things have generally gotten a bit better, but the improvements in the quality of construction has not kept stride with the inflated property values. As long as workers are paid what can only be described as barely a subsistence wage the problem of poor quality construction will continue to plague China. In a land where labor shortages have never been an issue  – where one person fills a hole as well as any other – undervalued labor guarantees an inferior product, and construction becomes a constant state. That is, as long as the money holds out.

Wenming is propaganda boilerplate, an adjective that can be used to recognize or distinguish an achievement by, say, a particular work unit – wenming danwei – which is all well and good in Chinese, though to mention in English that the work unit is now “civilized” plants the question, “What were they before?” The wenming construct can also be used as a civilizing reminder, sometimes found in signs over urinals in men’s room: xiangqian yi xiao bu, wenming yi da bu : “One small step forward, one big step for civilization,” as a way of saying “It’s better not to pee on the floor.”

But choosing to go English and round-eyed pixie-ish at the heart of the Central Business District invites photos like this.

Perhaps this one should be wenming zhongyang dianshi tai (Civilized China Central Television), as admonition.

There is now an odd mojo-y smoky shadow hanging over the place that will not interpret well though the Chinese filter. Can you imagine a great rush to book into a hotel with 44 floors that has been through what appears on endless videos as a barely contained eruption of Hell, even though the containment might have everything to do with the superior engineering of the construction.

While the rebuilding (“repairs”) is not a surprise, the Shanghai Daily is also reporting that it will still be a five-star hotel.

After repairs, the building will retain the original look, according to Beijing Urban Construction Group. It will accommodate a five-star hotel, a 1,500-seat theatre and other support facilities as designed. The futuristic-looking 5-billion-yuan (US$735 million) CCTV complex features a pair of enormous, leaning buildings of black glass and steel. The fire in February engulfed an adjacent 159-meter, 44-story building that was to house a luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which was only weeks away from opening.

What is noteworthy in the Shanghai Daily piece is that the Mandarin Oriental Hotel (MO) is referred to in the past tense. Does this mean that the MO has managed to back out of the deal, and that there will be another hotel company stepping in? I cannot imagine that the MO would still be involved with this project, seeing as how the partner/owner, China Central Television, was responsible for its destruction. In February 2009 Mandarin Oriental employees, along with their families who had moved to Beijing, were nearing the opening day when everything went up in fire and smoke. Subsequently the families moved out of Beijing.

It will be interesting to see who ends up with their name on the side of this one. If it is still the Mandarin Oriental I would be surprised. With the images of the building so publicly and wildly exploding still vivid, and with so many videos of the conflagration posted on the internet, I don’t see people queuing up to reserve rooms. If I were to bet, I’d put my money on a state-run five-star hotel. Besides the obvious jinx factor, what international company in their right mind would want to partner up with CCTV on this one? But if it ends up still being the Mandarin Oriental, you can bet they cut a sweet deal, since CCTV would probably do anything not to have this look as bad as it is.
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Another curious bit in the Shanghai Daily article:

More than 20 people have been arrested over the accident, including staff from CCTV, the fireworks company, the building’s designer, builder, supervisor and suppliers.

They will be tried in two groups, with the first batch due to go to trial before mid February and the rest around March, according to earlier reports.

If staff from the” building’s designer” have been arrested, does this mean someone (or more) from OMA is going to be on trial shortly? Anyone know anything about this?
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Update: January 26, 2010, 8:45 PM (+8 UTC)

The article in the Shanghai Daily stated that staff from the “building’s designer” were involved in the upcoming trials. A spokesman for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has assured me that no personnel from OMA or ECADI are involved in the upcoming trials related to the TVCC fire last February.