To understand Koolhaas’s conception of Bigness it is best to read his own words, a piece written in 1994 and aptly titled “Bigness,” published in Koolhaas’s and Bruce Mau’s doorstop book  S,M,L,XL. A copy of the essay can be found here. To distill it into a few words – even though the piece is not long – is not something that I’d attempt doing, though a snippet will give you some notion of where Koolhaas is going here:

The absence of a theory of Bigness–what is the maximum architecture can do?–is architecture’s most debilitating weakness. Without a theory of Bigness, architects are in the position of Frankenstein’s creators: instigators of a partly successful experiment whose results are running amok and are therefore discredited.

Because there is no theory of Bigness, we don’t know what to do with it, we don’t know where to put it, we don’t know when to use it, we don’t know how to plan it. Big mistakes are our only connection to Bigness.

But in spite of its dumb name, Bigness is a theoretical domain at this fin de siecle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility. Only through Bigness can architecture dissociate itself from the exhausted artistic/ideological movements of modernism and formalism to regain its instrumentality as vehicle of modernization.

Bigness recognizes that architecture as we know it is in difficulty, but it does not overcompensate through regurgitations of even more architecture. It proposes a new economy in which no longer “all is architecture,” but in which a strategic position is regained through retreat and concentration, yielding the rest of a contested territory to enemy forces.

It is worth noting again that this piece was written in 1994. What has become OMA’s boldest signature piece is the CCTV Headquarters Building,  the prime shaker in the trio of buildings that define the complex. The other two buildings are the TVCC, aka Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which spectacularly burned on February 9, 2009, and the Service Building, the low profile “central energy center” of the complex. Filler describes it thusly:

What is likely to remain Koolhaas’s most controversial commission is now nearing completion in Beijing: the 4.2-million-square-foot China Central Television Headquarters, begun in 2004 and now at least three years behind its original estimated occupancy date, with an estimated cost of more than $800 million. (A disastrous 2009 fire, which destroyed the OMA-designed hotel next to the giant structure, was largely responsible for the delay.)
…

The glass-and-metal-skinned Beijing behemoth is basically a pair of slightly inward-leaning L-shaped towers on two opposing corners of a vast square, and joined at the top by a breathtaking right-angled cantilevered overhang that imbues the composition with gravity-defying bravado. The horizontal and vertical elements interconnect in a continuous series of eight segments, a snakelike circulation system quite unlike that of any other office-and-broadcasting facility.

With a plethora of bizarre new architecture engulfing them, baffled Beijingers have devised a new architectural lexicon recalling the wry coinages long perfected by witty Berliners, who, for example, have dubbed the glass dome of Norman Foster’s Reichstag renovation of 1992–1999 die Käseglocke (the cheese cover). Thus the two-legged CCTV colossus has become colloquially known as da kucha(big pants crotch). In trying to preempt a sarcastic nickname of this sort, officials wanted to get locals to refer to the CCTV building as zhi chuan—knowledge window—a pretentious choice that backfired because of its close homophonic echo of zhi chuang—hemorrhoid.

But whatever moniker people adopt, one can predict that they will be beguiled by the highly unusual and equally controlled tourist route that is being built through the CCTV nerve center. Visitors will be able to navigate the premises in one nonstop loop while never disturbing day-to-day activities, a sure-fire public relations coup that will confer a bogus semblance of transparency on what of course is anything but an open operation.

What is not mentioned in this piece is the client, China Central Television (CCTV), the “enemy forces” to which Koolhaas, OMA and architecture must yield. While what goes on inside the building remains a mystery — interior changes that have been made to the original design remain shrouded in the ‘brand’ silence — one obvious external change that sticks out like the outsized head of a colossal roofing nail left unashamedly proud is the circular helo deck–the welded ill-fitting skullcap that dulls the impact of the symbolic threat of the work. The decision to plop it atop the structure is indicative of the client’s ignorance of what it really is they’ve purchased and have had built, as well as missing the point in how I imagine they would like to be perceived: they blunted their pummeling weapon! Their pseudo-imperial we’re-all-engineers-and-know-what’s-right arrogance is characteristic of official overbearing China, a ruling low class that elevates utility and cheapness above all other considerations. “We know what the Chinese people need, and what they need is a silly circular cap atop the unforgivingly rectilinear icon that hovers over their heads like some medieval weapon. It’s to mirror the shape of the sun. It’s feng shui. It’s a Kongzi cap. It’s what the Chairman, in all his waxen decrepitude, would have wanted if he’d lived this long. He still guides us.” They’ll say some such shit like this. And say it with a straight face. Lying, after all, is an art they’ve mastered.

The helm-boys just can’t NOT fuck up good space, and they’ve proven, without a doubt, that they’re champs at making bad cartoons. They’ve incompetently botched it all up. Beijing — nearly the entire city, and especially the concrete field of the Maoist monument to gigantism, Tian’anmen Square, with its fringe of pre-Legos block buildings (“We built the Great Hall of the People and those history/cultural things in ten months, and the Maosoleum in only six!” Really! … That long?!) — has been and continues to be an ongoing pillage. From September 30, 1949 — the day Mao “laid the foundation stone” for the Monument to the People’s Heroes — forward the Party has done their muscled best to uglify Beijing, capped by their macabre Olympian effort to turn the capital into a caricature of a real city once they scored the 2008 Games. Is this sort of incompetence an effect from a philistine pre-disposition for destruction? I don’t believe so. It’s just simple crass ignorance, unharnessed greed and a lack of any significant urban vision that drives them. It’s as if nearly every implemented decision has been made by a committee of urban illiterates who believe self-interest and foreign bank accounts will save them.

But it’s not as if there haven’t been people here fighting for a more consistent, respectful development of this great city, because there have been and the battle has been hard. Most of them, if not all, have essentially been, at best, blown off by those who’ve had no idea how much they didn’t/don’t know, by those who have lived and ruled by the diktat that the crudeness of political agendas draped in abstract ideals bereft of meaning always trumps good sense and aesthetic sensibility. Think of this whenever you’re stuck in traffic on the Second Ring Road, atop the old city walls that were torn down. The official greed and corruption that has driven Beijing’s most recent development has done it’s best to eviscerate a city and its history. Luckily for Beijing, the native Beijingers, a rowdy, expressive bunch, still give their city the flavor it so well deserves, even as so many of them have been and continue to be displaced to the fringes of the city, closer to Tianjin and Hebei province than they are to where they once lived. Those with the cash have taken the center, which is the recipe for disaster in China.

Though we have watched the anguished gutting of Beijing as urbanization continues to rock the population, we won’t know how much the original design of  the CCTV Building has been victimized by the ham-handed (and hame-headed) whims of key players within the Ministry of Truth. It looks as if we will find out, at least a bit, once the highly controlled public visitors loop is finally opened sometime later this year. We’ll probably be able to view about 1% of the total volume of the building, which is still a higher percentage than we glimpse of the machinations of the CPC. I guess we should be happy with just a peek.

How does he deal with a country where democracy is a work in progress? “I’m happy you use the term ‘work in progress,’ because I think that is the essence of China,” he says. “It’s not a perfect situation, but what is important is that CCTV [China Central Television] is not directly an element of the state.

In 2005 as the project began emerging from the ground, in a special issue of Architecture+Urbanism dedicated to the CCTV project, Ole Scheeren who was then the head architect of the project – in 2009 he left the firm and set out on his own – stated in the introduction to the issue:

As the national television station, CCTV has a direct relationship to the State — is information filter and propaganda machine — and receives subsidies to fulfil this role.

Scheeren goes on to say that the “economic dependency [of CCTV] is deceptive,” that the amount of tax revenues CCTV returns to the State through advertising revenues outlegs the State subsidies by “four or five times,” and that the amount of return could pay for the headquarters building in just a year. Whether that is true or not is anyone’s guess, since the only ones who might possibly know the true cost of the project are the bean counters in the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, though I imagine the duties are sliced and diced so thoroughly that no one other than a single guy – or a single Top Secret redline – knows the actual cost to date. Suffice it to say that any early estimates have long since been mightily heaved beneath the bus as costs have, literally, skyrocketed through the roof (remember the TVCC fire?). But I wander.

The more interesting comparison is what is the difference between Koolhaas’s “CCTV is not directly an element of the state,” and Scheeren’s “CCTV has a direct relationship with the State.” There is obviously a hair-splitting semantic distinction here, though the bigger question still remains, “If not ‘direct’ then how would one describe CCTV’s relationship to the State?”

The CCTV English: About Us page clearly states that “China Central Television (CCTV) is the national TV station of the People´s Republic of China and it is one of China’s most important news broadcast companies. Today, CCTV has become one of China’s most influential media outlets.”

Again, this doesn’t really clear it up, though “national” in relation to CCTV clearly has a different meaning than the “national” in, say, NBC. The National Broadcasting Company does not introduce itself as the “national TV station of the United States of America.” That sounds like something we’d expect to see from the Murdoch/Fox folks, though even they have just enough sense to restrain themselves; “fair and balanced” is about as far as they can stretch it without coming completely apart at the seams.

Wikipedia puts it thusly:

China Central Television falls under the supervision of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television which is in turn subordinate to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China [which is largely synonymous with the Central People's Government]. A Vice Minister of the state council serves as chairman of CCTV.
…
The network’s principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State, and so are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China; nearly all of them are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality.

The suctioning tentacles of “State” feel wetly icky and pretty direct to me. So, why this distancing by Koolhaas? Why this denial of directness? More Koolhaas leg-pulling? Perhaps. Or is this just wishful thinking, a musing attempt to deflect the criticism that OMA has received for building one of the great buildings of the age for a reactive totalitarian government that is getting more reactive and repressive every day? Hard to know. And I’m betting Koolhaas won’t ever say.

There is not much more to say other than I am glad that the test took place on the 20^th and not the 21^st. Tonight the air quality in Beijing is hazardously Beyond Index which means that breathing what passes for air can be deadly. It’s the contemporary equivalent and stealth mass marketing of slow slicing or death by ten thousand cuts, or let’s add 5,000 cars per week (as reported in the SCMP) to the already hopelessly knotted Beijing rigor motors highway system. To understand what “crazy bad” air is (PM2.5; 584.0; 500; Beyond Index), have a look here. Last night, on the other hand, at 1900 local time while I was meandering through the Central Business District (CBD) taking photos, the same monitoring station at the U.S. Embassy, just three kms or so north of the CCTV HQ Building complex, registered PM2.5; 138.0; 193; Unhealthy. If the lighting test had been scheduled for this evening I would not be out there gagging on this gunk. Staying indoors tonight with my IQAir cranking.

Below are some of the photos that I took last evening. For more photos have a look here. There is a slideshow option that works well enough. I am still adding to this set, so if you like them and want more check back over the next day or two. For a larger version click on the photos below.

Monday, October 11 was a very good day, and the AQI was in the Good to Moderate range. So, with air to breathe and autumn light to die for, I headed over to the CBD (Central Business District) and took photos in the vicinity of the CCTV Headquarters Building project. As you can see below, the work on the TVCC (what was almost the Beijing Mandarin Oriental Hotel) continues on, and it has received a new head, which was not in the original design. For better quality and larger photos, click on the photos below.

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.
________

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!

________

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.