Absurdity, Allegory and China

A few months back (October 14, 2011) Rem Koolhaas, brand architect behind OMA, the architectural firm that has been involved with the design and building of the iconic CCTV Headquarters Building on the East Third Ring Road, was the subject of an article in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek: Pritzker Star Koolhaas Frets Over EU, Tops Giant Beijing [...]

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I had to make a quick trip to Guomao this morning, so, of course, I brought along my camera. I wanted to follow up on a story from a couple of days ago. Late Friday morning, December 23, 2011, during the demolition of a building near the CCTV Headquarters Building, a part of said building [...]

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What a difference 34 months makes. Not the same angle, but the same lane. The b&w (top) was taken in the lane between Hujialou East and West on the afternoon of March 24, 2008. The color photo (bottom) was taken in the late afternoon today, January 5, 2011 on the now treeless lane between Hujialou [...]

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It has been awhile since I’ve blogged, though not because I’ve not wanted to. I just haven’t wanted too enough. Inertia is … addictive. The force that changed my direction was, as it has so often been, the CCTV HQ Building. On the evening of December 20, 2010, the folks at the CCTV Headquarters Building [...]

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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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The CCTV Building project has been rife with rumors since before the first hole was dug, and the latest one (via niubi at Twitter) was spotted on Weibao, a Chinese microblogging service. The rough translation (and I stress “rough”) is “Heard that my foolish masters’ big underpants scorched little brother [TVCC] must be demolished tomorrow, [...]

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At the end of June Vanity Fair, in a web exclusive, published Vanity Fair’s World Architecture Survey: the Complete Results. 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 [...]

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It usually takes me a bit of time to go through my photos after a trip to my favorite site in Beijing, the CCTV Bldg. project (or what I sometimes refer to as metaphor central) on the East Third Ring Road. In the last few days I have finally gotten around to looking through what [...]

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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 [...]

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Here are some photos of the CCTV in color, all taken in the late afternoon/early evening, April 23, 2010

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