Absurdity, Allegory and China » CCTV fire

Passing It On?

jg — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:18:33 +0000

Alex Pasternack has a piece on the CCTV fire at Far East Economic Review, entitled Beijing’s Trial By Fire. There is an accompanying soundslides picture presentation, A CCTV Building Burns to a Crisp. Some of the photos from the video were taken by my daughter, Moira, who happens to live within a five-minute walk of the infamous project and was present at the witless burning. So I am happy to see that she has gotten her name in the CCTV lights. Perhaps now she’ll take her dad more seriously when he says she needs to get more involved with photography. In China you’ll need a VPN or some other end-around, since FEER is on the Nanny’s bad list.

–The proud father

And just because, here’s another one of my photos of the charred wreckage. (Click for a larger version.)

Wreckage

jg — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:11:29 +0000

I finally went to Beijing at the end of this past week (March 12 & 13, 2009) and, unsurprisingly, spent some time around the East Third Ring Rd. photographing the CCTV project. I’d received a phone call a week or two ago to tell me that a high fence was being erected around the spectacular wreckage of the TVCC (Television Culture Center), aka Mandarin Oriental Beijing, and true enough, it was as high (est: five-stories) as the one that has been permanently around it’s more popular partner in propaganda production, the leaning towers of CCTV. No longer are there any views from the corner of Chaoyang Lu south to the new Jintaixizhao subway entrance. Is the erection of the new wall to hide great secrets or is it from sheer embarrassment on the part of the CCTV officials who are not (yet?) in jail? My guess is that it is more the latter, although prior to the fire I would have bet that it was impossible to embarrass anyone from CCTV. A quick flip through the channels at any time of day is testament to their utter shamelessness. But I guess torching your own building on an auspicious evening, Yuan Xiao Jie, and, through sheer insolence, incompetency and total disregard of civil law, turning a nearly completed landmark building into the world’s largest Roman candle is enough to even flush the cheeks of the China Central Television people. It makes me, if only for a moment, lean in the direction of believing in miracles, but then I get my balance and realize that life is full of the unexpected.

There are many misfortunes attached to this disaster, the most obvious and greatest being the death of a firefighter. But the ripple effect continues to claim more victims. One group that has been dramatically impacted is the Mandarin Oriental Hotel management staff, some of whom have been in Beijing for the past two years; most have already left or are in the process of leaving. And in the midst of the economic sinkhole that is swallowing the world, the prospects for their future cannot be rosy. But despite the hardships that have befallen some, a story in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week points towards the schadenfreude factor: China luxury hotel glut too much of a good thing.

“You had so many new hotels opening in the Olympic lead-up and even afterward. [Even] if it was business as usual, and we didn’t have a financial crisis, this would have been a tough year,” said Damien Little, a director of the hotel consulting company Horwath Asia Pacific. His company counted 126 hotel openings in Beijing last year, adding 29,000 rooms. Hotels that missed their deadlines for completion are still opening.
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Perhaps the only relief for Beijing’s beleaguered hotel industry is that the most feared competitor, the Mandarin Oriental, will not open anytime soon. The unopened hotel, in the China Central Television compound co-designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, was gutted in a fire last month.

“Nobody wants to say it, but that’s one less hotel,” Little said

Below are a few photos. Click to see larger versions. More photos from the this week here. And a lot more from the last fifteen months here.

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Alex Pasternack, who has written often and well on CCTV project, has recently posted the following piece that is well worth the read: In the Ashes of Rem Koolhaas’s TVCC, a Chance for Revision?

While it is tempting to discount projects like CCTV as a kind of architectural provocation, I don’t think Koolhaas and his brethren are a cynical bunch. Quite the contrary, Koolhaas sees the CCTV as a radical approach not just to high-rise architecture but to using architecture to introduce more openness into the state’s apparatus.

The Fire That Won’t Go Out

jg — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:05:20 +0000

According to the buzz on Twitter – niubi – it appears as if a more accurate assessment of the CCTV fire, which destroyed the Television Cultural Center (TVCC), has been reported on Caijing.com.cn magazine (subscription-based in Chinese, not English). According to niubi, who is a wealth of information on all things China, “1 bldg structurally toast 2. insurance won’t pay, “official” event 3. cctv chief retirement imminent” none of which is a surprise. I have been holding out hope that the structure would somehow miraculously survive, but there goes that thimbleful of warm fuzzies. The numbers are also rolling in on the overall cost of the project, courtesy again of niubi: “… new CCTV complex 2 date 12B+ RMB, + 7B+RMB for equipping. USD 3B+ …”

If it were any organization other than CCTV, I might be able to drum up a modicum of pathos, but I can’t help but feel that it couldn’t have happened to a more suitable group, the overbearing symbol of Big Brotherhooded arrogance, cultural dilution and rot. Now we can add “pathologic stupidity” to the list of modifiers that will forever peg them for who they are.

So does this mean that the TVCC will be coming down? That’s still specualtion – niubi is also asking the same question I’ve been asking myself for the last three weeks: Is the TVCC a counterweight to its more flash/less fire tipsy partner, the CCTV Headquarters Bldg? A good question. And one of these days there may be a good answer. Caijing is doing a good job of providing timely answers, despite the official unpopularity of the truth in all these reports and numbers.

The best page I’ve found on the CCTV fire is here at Caijing. It includes a a good illustration of how/where the fire at the TVCC Tower started and how it developed into such a memorable inferno on the night of February 9, 2009.

Gentlemen, Start Your Probes

jg — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:16:13 +0000

From Caijing Online, some thoughts on the fire at the TVCC.

Fire Report Issued by CCTV

The TV station’s report found that the fire was limited to the insulation under the titanium alloy, damaging only the surface of the high-rise.
…
A Chinese architecture expert, however, doubted some details in the report, saying, “It is unbelievable that the equipment inside is unharmed.”

What sparked TVCC?

Firefighters suspect that two professional grade fireworks struck the tower’s south side, burning through the thin metal wall and sparking the flammable insulation layer underneath, which then carried the fire over the entire building.

Several architects who helped design the CCTV complex suggested a slightly different possibility. After visiting the site and carefully surveying video and photos of the tower burning, they suspect the fireworks set flame to the tower’s exterior at several points. The flames continued from there to the insulation layer underneath, and then inside the building where interior decorations spread them further.

Heat transfer alone may have set fire to the building, said another architect who took part in the design of the TVCC. The reinforcing bars that cover the TVCC are metal and could have become superheated from the nearby explosions. If they became hot enough, said the architect, they could have kindled the insulation.

Once the fire caught, the hollow core between the fifth and twenty-sixth floors of the TVCC may have accelerated the burn. Moving air in this space would have provided the fire with ample oxygen creating a chimney effect, with pressure from the smoke, fire and hot air building inside this “chimney” until finally it exploded outward, carrying the fire through the whole building in the blink of an eye.

The Future of the TVCC Fire

jg — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:04:57 +0000

What looks clear from the post-fire photos is that the basic structural shape of the TVCC building does not appear to have been altered at all. The lines look to be consistent with the pre-fire lines, though what it looks like inside is still, for me, a guess. I don’t believe that there is any fear of collapse, though it was obviously something that looked apparent during the conflagration. I must reiterate that I have not been to the site, and all of my opinions are from others’ photos).

If, in fact, the structure is salvageable, this will become the story, which may be the silver lining for Arup and OMA. There are not many engineering tests that have been so publicly witnessed and so viewed, via youtube, by so many. In the past I’ve told people that if I were in Beijing during an earthquake and had a choice to pick a spot to be if the big one rolls through, I’d choose to be in one of those two buildings. A fire, obviously, is something quite different, but the engineering of this building may very well become the biggest and most spectacular story. Or, rather, one of the big stories (More on another future problem below.)

Arup’s Cecil Balmond is supposedly either in Beijing or on his way to assess the structure. Not much from OMA, other than a short mention of the ‘tragedy’ on their website. I assume that Rem Koolhaas will make an appearance soon enough, if he hasn’t already. I also imagine that he slips in and out fairly quietly.
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I believe that another huge problem facing this project in the future – if, in fact, the structure is recoverable – will be the public relations blitz that will need to be done in order to sell this site as a viable hotel, especially one with 44 floors. There is now an odd mojo-y smoky shadow hanging over the place that will not interpret well though the Chinese filter. Can you imagine a great rush to book into a hotel with 44 floors that has been through what appears on endless videos as a barely contained eruption of Hell, even though the containment might have everything to do with the superior engineering of the construction.

Another related story to watch would be the potential legal battle between CCTV and Mandarin Oriental Hotel, both of whom are well aware of the superstition rider that this building now carries. Will CCTV take the high road here, since they are responsible for burning down their own house? Well, if they do it will be the first time in their history that they would choose an honorable path over their penchant for constantly slogging down the lowest road. I’m not looking for any lost cherries on this one.
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I have not had the urge to go see it. I’ll wait for the crowds to thin out and then go have a look. I’ve been asked what I would have focused on if I’d been on-site the night of the fire, and there is no question what I would have been shooting: the burning TVCC as reflected from the CCTV HQ towers. There were already enough folks going for the flaming money shot, and there have been some real beauts. But I look forward to spending some time with it later in the dawn/early morning light before the city gets cranked and rolling.
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I have had much activity on my Flickr site regarding my CCTV HQ Project set, and this one has drawn the most attention:

West face of TVCC, March 15, 2008

More on the CCTV Fire (vid)

jg — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:26:01 +0000

Here is a video shot by my daughter, Moira, while she and I were speaking on the phone – me in Tianjin, she just west of the Third Ring Rd. – while the Television Culture Center (TVCC) went up in fire and smoke. She mentions on the vid that the building appears to be in the process of collapsing, though, in fact, it did not. And as of this moment, it still hasn’t. This video was taken from the entrance to the Grand Millennium Hotel, west of NW entrance (B) of Jintaixizhao Subway Station. The camera’s looking east at the west side of the TVCC at 9:47 PM.

China Central Television has apologized to the people for burning down their own building, as well as violating the law by not having a permit for setting off such heavy duty fireworks in the middle of the city. If they had gotten a license, I assume that would have meant that fire trucks would have been present before the show began, thereby …. Why even bother. There is a veritable gold mine of local and international lessons here, but I am going to resist kicking the dog, at least today.

More vids here.