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!

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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.