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.)
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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.

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.

For more photos see my Flickr photostream

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).

Mark Zuckerberg seems much more shameless than Sergey Brin or Larry Page could ever even imagine. Brin and Page genuinely seem like engineers tackling problems with engineering precision, though there are times when it is obvious that they need to be more understanding of why there are so many who fear that what seems like their good intentions is seen too much of an overreach into human privacy (think the rollout of Buzz which they believed was such a good idea that it didn’t need to be beta tested). I do not have the least sense that Zuckerberg is anyone who can be trusted as being unconsciously too earnest.  I had a Facebook account for several months, and though I enjoyed being in touch with many people I had not been in contact with for a very long time, I still never trusted it. When the last twisted batch of changes hit, I dutifully figured out what I had to do to try to minimize all the possible unwanted exposure. After that battery of changes was made I quit, since I realized I had no faith in the golden hoodie behind the product. I was unlikely to change my mind, even after the inevitable changes – that we knew had to come – finally came. At least for those of us who were paying attention. There seem to be a lot of folks who either don’t care or don’t have a clue about what’s been going on with Facebook, since they’re far too lost in their Facebook.

Commenting on Zuckerberg’s interview with AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid’s Mark Zuckerberg Talks (And Swerves Around) Facebook Privacy reports

Zuckerberg also brought up Facebook’s oft-repeated stat that over 50% of users have adjusted their privacy settings, citing it as evidence that users know what they’re doing (this doesn’t convince me in the slightest — that means nearly 250 million people haven’t touched them).

Wouldn’t you like to see the private video of the Facebook meeting where Mark “I have more money than a mule can shit” Zuckerberg is in the Big Chair surrounded by his minions when he says, “Listen if we keep it opt out only half of them will change their settings, which leaves us with 250 million dumb fucks to take to market.” I don’t have to stretch that far to get here, which is why I scuttled my account.

The next round of slippery changes are just around the corner. My feeling is “Why bother with it anymore?” The last thing I need is to be hooked on FB when they cut the product again.
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I’ve been having much trouble with the internet connection at our flat, which is where I work. It is there about 23 hours and 50 minutes a day, though it drops sometimes two/three times in 10 minutes. Sometimes I can get an an hour or two, but the chance of it holding on all day has been zero for the last four-and-half weeks. If I happen to be using a VPN the loss of connection will require a reboot, though if I am not on a VPN I can pick right up where I left off. My sense is that it is a problem in some “switching box” close to my home, though it has been very effective at being a total pain in the ass. As I write, it has been connected for 1:22:30, though I cannot imagine that it will hold out much longer. My fear is that it is a new strategy to disrupt GFW leaps, but I have no evidence that it is happening to anyone else. That said, here in Tianjin the speeds have been slower than they normally are, which means that the connection sometimes drops to late-90′s dial-up chugs. If there were someone to call, I’d call them. But it’s the Middle Kingdom, and no one wants to answer any questions. About anything.
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Yesterday it was reported that Wen Jiabao, while visiting Japan, went out for an early morning run through a Tokyo park, and at one point asked some of the locals, “Do you know who I am?” Perhaps this is one of those cross-cultural befuddlers, but I found the question a bit strange. This sort of question has the oddness you might pick up in a much younger princeling who, when caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar and faced with a reprimand or punishment, offers up loudly in a wholly threatening tone, “Do you know who my father is?”
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We will be moving at the end of the month to Beijing. Twelve years in its shadow is long enough. Tianjin has been fun, but the fun wore off for us a while ago, and my attempts to rekindle the spark have not been successful. So, we are looking forward to life in the capital city. Just in time to watch the rebuilding of the TVCC, the battered boot-shaped step-child of the CCTV Headquarters Building. And just in case you may have forgotten what it looks like, here’s a reminder:

May 23, 2010 - 6:05 PM