The Times Online has an interesting article on the new CCTV building in Beijing. I’m sure everyone has seen this new iconic building by now, it rises like a wracked square casting an imposing shadow over the city below.
It is no surprise to me that the co-architect of OMA’s CCTV building, Ole Scheeren, is an impossibly young (35 years old) German Architect who was lived through the unification of Communist and Capitalist Germany. In the shape of the building it is easy to see the fingerprints of earlier experiments in modernism, in both the stark oppressive communist variety and the lofty grasping skyscrapers of New York and Chicago. And yet it has been distorted and made more complex. It is almost as if someone took the Arche de La Defense and twisted it until not only did the building distort, but the skin was also skewed.
This building challenges not only the symbol of a skyscraper but also that of the communist party controlled media in China. It could be a building in the process of collapse, a colossus falling to the ground, or it could be seen as a tower pulling itself up from the ground. Just as it could be a symbol of oppressive all-seeing orwellian control, or possibly a watchdog sheltering the people of china and enshrining their future. Only time will tell.
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