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

The “new grads” need to step away from the dictionary and realize that translation is not a cut ‘n paste operation. It’s clear that this message hasn’t yet gotten through, despite a long history of pointed criticism. It highlights the deficiencies of how English is taught at all levels of the Chinese education system, where the only priority is passing a battery of domestic English tests, rather than actually understanding and practically using English.

I cannot even begin to imagine how much money was spent in this pubic relations (PR) campaign to promote a Civilized Chaoyang. (I assume that this was a government-funded project with the bill footed by the Chaoyang District taxpayers.) The signs are, embarrassingly, everywhere. The oddest thing is that it was launched in the capital, an international city chock-full of literate native English speakers, who, for a modest fee, could advise and vet such unflattering, failed attempts at cross-cultural sophistication. It also points out the wrong-headed direction of so many Chinese-to English translations aimed at the domestic market: it is generally understood that you translate into your native language rather than out of it into an other language – and often with the assistance of a native speaker of the target language. If I were running a responsible cross-cultural PR campaign in Brooklyn or Belleville and wanted to render native English or French into Chinese – even if I’d studied Chinese since primary school – I would first run it by a literate native Chinese translator before I’d go to print and possibly end up looking like a fool to my target audience of Chinese readers.

But in China this sort of mangled Chinese-to-English translation is standard fare, confirming, once again, that the audience is clearly not native English speakers. This is English as an official status marker, directed at a Chinese audience (“See, we’re smart and inclusive, too. We know English.”) even if it is not only wrong, but also ridiculously inappropriate. Yes, new grads may need jobs, but the cost in international perceptions is at the expense of the Chinese culture, which deserves a lot better than this. Advice to Chinese PR firms: if you don’t need the English, let it go, but if you want to include it, you have to get it right, which means spending a few extra kuai for vetting. (In a neighborhood where I lived several years ago there was a hair salon with a very large sign that advertised itself in English as “Sea Sail Nurses Dreaming.” You could take this in a lot of directions, none of which have anything to do with actually getting a haircut – which, of course, may have been the point, though, still, the business didn’t last all that long.)

These sorts of thoughtless attempts at translation are very public reinforcements of a broken system that further impairs Chinese learners who actually want to improve their English skills. Accurate visual reinforcement is always a benefit, though when it’s inaccurate, it fortifies mistakes. But this is not about education; it’s all about grooming an ‘educated’ internal image, even if it turns out to be a goofy joke to anyone who really understands the other language.

The photo in the initial post was taken in the Central Business District, a focus of international engagement. The billboard is hardly a “best foot forward” representation of international awareness and worldly cool. In reality, it is quite the opposite. But then again, what better location for a joke – the high walls surrounding the perpetual CCTV Building project. The problem here is that the first rule of humor is that it’s always better to tell a joke than it is to be one.

I won’t even begin to deal with the round-eyed pixie. That’s not even a joke. That’s what’s known as cliché.

For links to slide shows of the planning, production/fabrication and installation go here.

"Collaborate" by Sun Yu Li

If your plan is to make a scene, I am asking you to review your reasons for coming here. If you are coming here to free Tibet, don’t bother coming. More often than not those who do the loudest wailing have no idea what that means to the lives of all the poor Tibetans in China who have no idea why things just got worse. All they really know is that things just got a whole lot worse. They don’t need your self-righteousness being played out in China. They don’t need your Olympic plans to make the world a better place. What may sound like a good idea in a well-lit meeting room in a comfortable Student Center, may, in fact, be the absolute worst thing you could possibly do.

To exacerbate an already bad situation, then hop on a jet and fly back home, is not helping anyone at all. No one needs false ‘heroics’ now, especially the indigenous Tibetans who are, more often than not, disregarded by everyone when it comes to promoting outside agendas. … The reality of life in the countryside is a lot more difficult than what you can possibly imagine it to be. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s always about them, so learn who they are and how their lives go down every day, which, at the moment, is difficult, to say the least. You should ask yourself if what you are planning to do would make life any more difficult for the lives of those who you believe you are helping. The saying, “First do no harm,” is actually not a cliché. Pay it some attention. There are other, more effective ways to make your voices heard.

One week into the Games and we’ve seen the self-righteous waving, swinging and unfurling of one thing and another by those with a higher message. It’s tiresome, counter-productive, and irksomely self-promoting. And now in what appears to be a piss poor piece of journalism, a story by the Guardian’s Jonathan Haynes, accompanied by an incriminating photo, tells us all that it has happened again, this time along the East Third Ring Rd. The accuracy of the story is highly questionable.

The photo shows a couple of folks swinging from ropes from the wall of giant billboards along the what appears to be the western perimeter of the CCTV Bldg. property, not the actual building as Haynes reports.

The pair abseiled down the building’s glass facade and hung their banner over an Olympics billboard with the slogan “Beijing 2008″ at 5.45am local time.

If, in fact, I am correct about the location of the pair – on one of the billboards along the East Third Ring Rd. – it would be virtually impossible to abseil down that side of the building and end up on the billboards. Tower 1 leans 6 degrees to the east, not the west, and to abseil from the building to the billboards would be a real trick, one that would have needed a boom, some expensive and cleverly rigged wires, and the creative direction of Zhang Yimou. It appears to me from the photo that the pair of self-promoting rope folks were near the new Jintaixizhao subway entrance, close to the CCTV Bldg, but hardly on it. I expect better of the Guardian. And if I am wrong, I will be more than happy to apologize to Mr. Haynes, though I think that the apology will be owed by them for their shoddiness of reporting.

At the end of June I was in Paris and happened upon a copy of the Architecture and Urbanism, July 2005 Special Issue on the “CCTV by OMA.” It was not cheap, and I walked away from it, though the details of this thick, glossy issue were too much to … walk away from. Later Beth went back to the shop and bought the copy. The main attractions were the architectural renderings, along with plans, sections and elevations of both main buildings in the complex, as well as drawings and renderings of the other buildings and proposed public spaces within the borders of this massive project.

Last week Jeremy at Danwei mentioned the following concerning the helipad:

On a related subject, the iconic new CCTV building designed by Rem Koolhaas has had its clean lines ruined by the addition of a helicopter landing pad on the roof.

The gossip in Beijing is that Koolhaas was enraged by the late-breaking design change, …

In a follow up to my comment where I mentioned the Architecture and Urbanism special issue he posted the following:

I called a staff member of Koolhaas’ firm OMA in Beijing. He told me he was too busy right now to find out what happened: essentially “no comment”.

Below are three photos (click on the photos for larger versions) from the issue showing the helipad as part of the long-term plan. If there is a rub it is probably not over the helipad, but rather the change that grew it from a square contained within the perimeter of the footprint, into a circle that overhangs the edges, as well as raising the deck of the pad above the high point of the roof. It’s all about the mashing (not the meshing) of shapes, and how some things can, unexpectedly, change. It is, after all, CCTV.

There’s the bullet train from Tianjin to Beijing (and vice versa, though we only took it one way) to report on. And Ai Wei Wei and Norman Foster at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing 798 on the morning of August 8th, an odd encounter on Wangfujing, water polo, a retired Brazilian colonel in the rain, and George Bush, both of them: we shared the same basketball game, though they were on the far, other side and I am quite sure that we were seeing the entire experience from distinctly different angles.

And (surprise!) I took more photos of the CCTV Headquarters Building in Olympiadic repose. (Click on any of the photos below for a larger version.)

And there are a lot more here, which I will be adding to over the next few days.