Beijing Manifesto p. 05-06
Beijing Manifesto p. 05-06 - The China Central Television headquarters will be located in the northern part of Beijing’s new Central Business District, near the intersection ofChang’an Avenue and the Third Ring Road. We aim to break ground later this year and to complete the project in time for the 2008 Olympics.The site covers about four blocks, with a total area of 180,000 square meters. There are two major buildings – CCTV, which hosts TV-production facilities, and TVCC, a hospitality center with a hotel. On the southeast block, the Media Parkwill be open to the public for events and enter- tainment, as well as available for outdoor filming.In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department – the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera – talks about the others as “them”; distrust is rife, motives are questioned.But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence – a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.After our design was accepted, it created two kinds of apprehension, if not disappointment. First, was it merely a landmark, one more alien proposal of meaningless boldness? Was its structural complexity simply irresponsible? On August 5, 2003, an afternoon event at Tsinghua University allowed all parties to vent criticism.It was not easy, I realized, for the assembled intelligentsia to see the difference between CCTV and any of the other foreign extravaganzas still in the pipeline. There was surprise at my description of the building as a collective, a word with com- plex associations. There was relief when the building, which had been considered in isolation, was presented in conjunction with our larger proposals for historical preservation in Beijing and a low-rise business district, revealing an interlocking hypothesis for Beijing’s future land use … the beginnings of a Beijing Manifesto.Still, the younger audience members questioned allocating resources to “prestige,” even while western China is ravaged by poverty; and the older generation of engineers was shocked to see the objective purity of their profession at the service of the unusual. A pact between the two sides – a coalition of the unwilling – could easily close a possibility that had just been opened.A refusal of the Promethean in the name of correctness and good sense could foreclose China’s architectural potential. © OMA

In early 2002, my office received two invitations: one to propose a design for Ground Zero, the other to propose a design for the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing. We discussed the choice over Chinese food. The life of the architect is so fraught with uncertainty and dilemmas that any clarification of the future, including astrology, is disproportionately welcome. 

My fortune cookie that night read: STUNNINGLY OMNIPRESENT MASTERS MAKE MINCED MEAT OF MEMORY.

We chose China.

BY REM KOOLHAAS