For more photos see my Flickr photostream

At Xingfucun Zhonglu, fifty meters west of Xindong Lu, near Sanlitun.
–Beijing, CN September 5, 2010 12:24 PM

My sense is that the demolition work is actually (finally) the gutting of the building in order to proceed with substantive renovation not rebuilding as the rumor suggested.  And as I understand it, the renovation work should take 2-3 years. Below find several photos from yesterday near the project, a day I normally would not have gone to shoot this place once again. (If you click on the photos they will take you to larger, clearer versions in a Flickr lightbox, a vast improvement over what Flickr was for much too long.)

Man on a trike, the 402 and traffic on the East Third Ring Rd. --August 11, 2010 9:46 AM

Layers of Civilized Chaoyang, from the foreground office of Xanadu, an upscale develpoment that has displaced nearly everyone in Hujialou Xi, to the TVCC and the CCTV Headquarters Bldg. in the background. The manga-ed billboard in the mid-range, right, is compliments of people who have no idea of just how much they don't know. --August 11, 2010 11:03 AM

It is what it is: a man on a crane, the CCTV Headquarters Building with funny helodeck beanie and the Bad Air of Beijing. --August 11, 2010 10:47 AM

Man on a porch in Hujialou Xi. He is either a worker who is squatting or the last holdout in the midst of the development of Xanadu, an upscale development north of the CCTV Headquarters project. This lone building has stood in defiance of the gentrification that has leveled the rest of Hujialou Xili (and will eventually consume the whole Hujialou area) with the former residents displaced to the outskirts of the huge and very sprawling capital of the Kingdom --August 11, 2010 11:18 AM

Strangely (and familiarly) patterned wind-filled rag - an IOU? - snagged in the concertina wire on the north side of the CCTV Headquarters project's razored perimeter, with the TVCC in the background. --August 11, 2010 11:48 AM

Woman on a tricycle in Hujialou --August 11, 2010 11:25 AM

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Update, August 13, 2010, 8:43 AM
Here is an article from the Strait Times (Singapore): Workers rebuilding TV tower

"H-A-S ... A-N-Y-B-O-D-Y ... S-E-E-N ... S-A-M ... L-O-W-R-Y?"

The Television Culture Centre, Beijing, CN
August 11, 2010, 11:04 AM
An extremely shitty air day in the business heart of the Kingdom.
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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.