CCTV央视大楼

CHINA AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF WESTERN IDEAS
Chinese clients crave innovation and hunt beyond China to get it. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, architects were more technicians than artists, and private architectural firms were a rarity until a decade ago. Coupled with China’s low wage workers, this mix makes foreign architects design’s that would be too expensive to build back home, cheap in China. (national geographic)
For centuries China’s leaders have reshaped the capital to showcase their power and reflect their preoccupations. The Forbidden City was constructed during the 15th century to project the Ming dynastic rulers’ connection to heaven. A throng of Soviet-style halls, stadiums, and vast boulevards sprang up in the 1950s and ‘60s following the Communist Party’s rise to signify the collective strength of workers and the absolute control of Mao’s rule. Now Beijing, the capital, is being remade as China’s global city.
CCTV HEADQUARTEΒιβλιοθήκη BaiduS BY OMA
SS09-ARCHITECTURAL ANALYSIS SEMINAR ANTHONY ADELMANN
BACKGROUND
China is growing at an historically unparalleled rate. China Central Television (CCTV) plans to increase its current 13 channels to more than 200 by the year 2008 to successfully compete with CNN, NBC, Sky, and the BBC in the global television market. To enable this expansion, and to firmly place CCTV on the global map, a new headquarters was needed. The brief called for all the functions of the entire television-making process to be housed in one location, but not necessarily one building within Beijing’s newly-designated Central Business District.
ACTUAL FORM
ICONOGRAPHY OF CCTV HEADQUARTERS
Every company strives to be unique. In the word’s of the architect, CCTV’s distinctive loop aims to “offer an alternative to the exhausted typology of the skyscraper. In spite of their potential to incubate new cultures, programs, and ways of life, most skyscrapers accommodate merely routine activity, arranged according to predictable patterns. Formally, their expressions of verticality have proven to stunt the imagination: as verticality soars, creativity crashes. Instead of competing in the hopeless race for ultimate height and style within a traditional two-dimensional tower “soaring” skyward, CCTV proposes a truly three-dimensional experience, culminating in a canopy that symbolically embraces the entire city.”
SITE
Fact bits Status: Competition 2002; Completion 2009 Client: China Central Television (CCTV) Site: 20 hectares in new Central Business District Program: CCTV total 465.000m2 including administration, program offices, news production, broadcasting, program production, staff facilities, parking. TVCC total 95.000m2 including hotel, public facilities, parking and service building Budget: 5 billion RMB (850 million euro) Tower 1 Height 234m 54 floors footprint: 40*60m, 2400m2 Tower 2 Height: 210m, 44 floors, footprint: 40*52m, 2000m2 Overhang bottom 162m, 14 floors Overhang cantilever 75m to the west, 67m to the south Base height 45m, 9 floors footprint 160*160m Basement -18m, 4 floors
In early 2002, CCTV organized an international design competition. It was won in August that year by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), based in Rotterdam. In order to comply with Chinese Architecture laws, OMA formed an alliance with the East China Architecture and Design Institute (ECADI), which would act as the local design institute of record for both architecture and engineering.
CCTV TIMELINE
ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPT AND INTERPRETATION
CONCEPT FORM
In its architectural response, OMA decided that it should consolidate administration, program production, and broadcasting- the entire process of Chinese Television- in a single loop of interconnected activities. In this way, the form of CCTV is a single loop, thus reinforcing the inherent idea of connectivity that a loop symbolizes. This was done to break down the divisions that tend to form in a complex and compartmentalized process like making television programs, and create a building whose layout in three dimensions would force all the parties involved to mix and hopefully produce a better end-product more economically and efficiently because of the increase in communication.
SHAPE
The form of CCTV is a little distorted and off-center. I understand OMA’s logic as trying to deal with the idea of randomness and freedom and the presence of some rigid, organizing element behind the reason. For example, in Delirious New York, Koolhaas talks about the craziness of buildings and the urban context of Manhattan, yet all of this apparent ‘disorder’ is contained within the strict grid of Manhattan. The grid acts as an organizer of the disorder which allows it to happen. In CCTV, the order and logic of the building is restrained in the façade. The somewhat free form of the building is reigned in and supported by the diagonal bracing.
FACADE
In collaboration, the team determined that the only way to deliver the desired architectural form of the CCTV building was to engage the entire façade structure, creating an external continuous tube system. Adopting this approach gave proportions that could resist the huge forces generated by the twisted and leaning form, as well as extreme seismic and wind events. The diagonal braces within the continuous tube structure visually express the pattern of forces within the structure and are an important aesthetic aspect of the cladding system.