An Unprecedented Form
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Scarcely less than in the days of Marco Polo, contemporary China has fired the imagination of the West. Its forest of pagodas has given way to skyscrapers, and the grand axis of Beijing has shifted from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square to something that calls itself the Central Business District (CBD). But even in this embrace of modernity, there is enchantment: the speed, the imperious hugeness of it all!
Hearing reports of whole districts, even cities rising almost overnight, New Yorkers can only look on in envy and awe. Despite a building boom of our own, our developers are hamstrung at every step by neighborhood organizations, landmark commissions, and alas, the rule of law. In Beijing, which is now buzzing with fully 6,000 construction sites, things appear to be more negotiable.
This is the context into which Rem Koolhaas and OMA, the architectural firm that he heads, have leapt with their designs, now under construction, for the China Central Television Headquarters (CCTV). These plans, as set forth in wall texts, renderings, and a mixed-media installation at the Museum of Modern Art, consist of three structures to be placed in a landscaped park. Able to accommodate more than 10,000 people, they should be fully operational for the opening of the Olympic Games in 2008.
Together with Ole Scheeren, Koolhaas has conceived a building complex of such overweening ambition as to invite, in a more pious age than ours, divine retribution. Its component structures are surely tall, but that is not the point. At this late date in the history of architecture, a 768-foot skyscraper, slightly shorter than the Met Life Building, is of little account. What is so distinctive about CCTV, rather, is its aggressive bulkiness, when seen from certain angles. Understand that this is no namby-pamby tower or slab. Rather it is a cubic mass, perforated and contorted into an entirely unprecedented form and occupying a public square four times the size of the World Trade Center site.
Are its component buildings any good? Too early to tell, of course. And even once they are built, a lot will depend upon the craftsmanship of their facture, something that only an eyewitness can gauge. But in considering this question, we can take guidance from several of OMA’s earlier projects. It is an ineffaceable fact about the career trajectory of Rem Koolhaas that, as he gets older, he improves: His use of materials grows richer and his articulation of space becomes a little subtler. The first important project that he realized, the massive Euralille in northern France (1994), has all the charm of a public lavatory. Its appalling mass of raw concrete is, we presume to hope, the last inglorious gasp of the Brutalist style.
Seven years later, in a very different project, the Prada flagship in SoHo, he moved some distance in achieving a superficial harmony, almost a grace, that is enhanced by unusual materials and surface patterns. Even here, however, there is less refinement than meets the eye. Although his student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which opened a little over a year ago, exhibits the same frantic collision of spaces, the same promiscuous multiplicity of forms, colors and materials that mark his Prada outlet, here you find the stirrings of some nascent restraint within the context of his programmatic chaos.
Which brings us to this latest achievement. As in previous projects, OMA has sought to make a cultural statement through its therapeutic embrace of clumsiness. In one sense, the CCTV building can be read as a skewed, Deconstructivist version of Paul Andreu’s Grande Arche in Paris, also called La Defense. In this reading, it claims to be a hybrid of three architectural typologies: the tall building, in the two towers that make up most of the structure; the bridge, connecting them at the top; and the lowlying building, which connects them at the base.
Whereas La Defense embodied that pristine order and symmetry so dear to the French, the two towers of the CCTV building slope inward, while an irregularly distributed tubular diagrid imparts an almost funky effect to the whole. There is surely a literary, even a painterly, subtext to this design. Koolhaas aspires to the sort of extravagantly futuristic and faintly dystopian fantasy building that might have adorned the cover of an L. Ron Hubbard potboiler from them 1960s — that is, a painter’s reverie on how buildings would look half a century hence. In designing such a form, OMA seems smitten with an almost naïve wonderment that the hour for such buildings may finally have arrived.
It is in a similar spirit that the firm has designed the nearby Television Cultural Center (TVCC) Building, which looks like a punctuated, multi-tiered skiramp. Unlike the larger CCTV Building, however, which is mainly for professionals working in the Chinese television industry, this structure is an entirely public space containing cultural facilities and a luxury hotel.
At the core of both buildings, however, is a lie that goes to the heart of almost every Deconstructivist project ever built: Its daring, rebellious formal statement is really no more integral to the project as a whole than a chassis is to a car. One of the exhibition wall texts is at pains to assure us that “the two towers (of the TVCC) slope six degrees in two directions, while their internal cores remain completely vertical.” In other words, under the post-modern carapace of these two towers lurks something suspiciously like the standard glass and steel towers of Midtown.
You will excuse me, I hope, if I pass over in silence OMA’s expensive talk about society and capitalism and the projection onto the entire site of Piranesi’s 18th-century map of Rome. All of that, together with the curators’ claim that “CCTV is the creation of an entire world,” can be pretty much discarded. One’s assessment of this latest project from OMA is predicated upon one’s entirely personal tolerance and indulgence of the intentional bulk and clumsiness of the complex as a whole. For my part, I should rather have designed La Defense.
Until February 26 (11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).