Detail: What form does your work with Rem Koolhaas take?
Scheeren: We do projects together and separately. We started working on CCTV together; it was the first project in the office to be done on the basis of explicit co-authorship. After we won the competition, we worked together intensively for a year in Rotterdam. Then I took on complete responsibility and now direct the development and realisation here in Beijing.
Detail: Are there – given so much independence – OMA design guidelines?
Scheeren: We try to avoid going that far. Of course we have a strong interest in creating a cohesive oeuvre. There are partner meetings on a regular basis in which we discuss all of the projects so that we can profit from each other’s knowledge, but which also hold the office’s work together with respect to contents and architecture. At the same time, in recent years more distinctive signatures have also crystallised.
Detail: What are the common denominators of OMA’s diverse projects?
Scheeren: One thing they have in common is the process through which we organise the work, as well as the inquisitiveness upon which the work is founded. We have no intention of grafting a formal concept onto a problem. We work analytically to try to understand a project in its context. The theme often arises out of the building’s function, but also via aspects of local and global networks.
Detail: You not only have your office in Beijing, you also relocated here.
Scheeren: Doing a project like CCTV involves immense responsibility, because what will ultimately become of it is important. This applies on all sorts of levels – for example, in determining whether such a project can be realised at all. International architecture concepts are still typically designed in the architect’s main office, and the finalised design is submitted as a package. Then local units take it from there. The architecture does not benefit from this, nor does the exchange process, which would allow us to learn from each other.
Detail: The CCTV renderings caught the ire of many critics. One of the accusations was that the formal gesture was inappropriate.
Scheeren: This project clearly came about in a unique historic situation. China had just become a member of the WTO – a form of international recognition as future global player. Then the Olympic Games entered the picture as a catalyst which set a date for China to present itself to a global audience. There was a certain symbolism that had to do with the conception of a “New China”, and it was in the context of this symbolism that we designed the building.
Detail: Rem Koolhaas coined the phrase “Fuck Context”. How does CCTV’s gesture relate it to its surroundings?
Scheeren: The crucial question for us was: What exactly is the context? Next to the historic context, there was of course the urban context. The competition brief – which I picked up in April 2002 – presented a somewhat absurd point of departure. The immediate vicinity, Beijing’s future central business district, was presented as a computer rendering of 300 skyscrapers. At the time, only three of them had been completed and no one knew how the rest would look.
Detail: “Delirious New York” sees skyscrapers’ urban potential primarily in multi-functionalism, but CCTV is mono-functional.
Scheeren: That is not quite right. CCTV is an enormously diverse construct. It not only unites all the disparate technical functions such as the central transmitting station and news or programme production, but it also links them together with a myriad of public areas such as lounges and chat rooms. This promotes communication in the building and creates public complexity in the interior spaces.
Detail: Why didn’t you just erect the tallest building in Beijing?
Scheeren: In order to circumvent the banality of conventional skyscrapers’ linear hierarchy and to express instead a more civic-minded vision of congregating, we came up with a building that takes an organising principle as the basis for its design. We translated the programme into a coherent overall system in which the areas are not isolated from one another, but meet up physically. This resulted in a loop of linked activities which are not only delineated on the outside as gesture, but in fact, also function internally as circuit.
Detail: How did the client respond?
Scheeren: CCTV’s average employee is 30 to 40 years old; these people will increasingly be taking on management positions and have a clear agenda for their country’s future. Change was an explicit goal and our proposals were accepted as a step toward more openness. BBC was named as role model.
Detail: CCTV differs from BBC in that China has no freedom of press: the media are impeded or manipulated by the government.
Scheeren: Our clients know that, but that is precisely what they aim to free themselves of. We attempted to design a television station which stands for openness, but, of course, architects do not have an influence on a society’s overall development. Nonetheless, perhaps it is possible to make some contribution. When Beijing was selected for the Olympic Games, the pride was not only palpable on the political level. The people really celebrated. On the building sites here, one encounters people who, despite working under harsh conditions, exhibit more friendliness and enthusiasm than elsewhere. One senses that a part of the change is being expressed a bit differently than it would be in the West.
Detail: To what extent do you have an influence on the building-site conditions?
Scheeren: In China, the architect’s role is defined slightly differently. In the West, the architect is the clients’ proxy, which means that he or she submits plans for approval, negotiates with construction firms, etc. In China, only the client can submit plans to the authorities. And it is the client who manages both the costs and the construction process. This system is a remnant of socialism, when architecture was standardised. It functions superbly when each person involved knows exactly what a drawing depicts, and because variety is kept to a minimum. However, when a high degree of innovation enters in and something is built which has no precedent worldwide, things get much more complicated. The technology is now available to erect such buildings, but the planning process has not yet adequately adjusted to these new conditions.
Detail: The large cantilevers and the oblique towers are a feat of engineering requiring an investment which seems out of proportion.
Scheeren: It is correct that the building borders on impracticability. Just a few years ago it still would have been impossible to bring it off. On the one hand, the complexity posed an enormous challenge, but on the other hand, once it was mastered, it became the project’s greatest stabilizing factor. Once it has been articulated, a complex concept such as ours can no longer easily be changed or diluted by external factors.
Detail: Doesn’t the construction require a colossal amount of steel?
Scheeren: In light of two towers which are inclined six degrees on two axes and the eleven storeys which cantilever 74 metres, 162 metres above the ground, it was naturally assumed at first that this building must be wasteful. But that is not the case – Beijing’s tallest building, at 300 metres, is currently under construction next door, and uses approximately the same amount of steel per square metre. The building for BTV (Beijing Television), also a vertical structure, requires nearly twice the amount of steel as CCTV.
Detail: What effect does the building’s slant have on its safety?
Scheeren: The building is equipped to withstand an earthquake of the magnitude which occurs in Beijing once in 2500 years. That makes it is one of the safest skyscrapers ever built. We know the exact performance of each of the 10 087 steel beams when subjected to the possible dynamic loads. Not only were the deformations calibrated in three different simulation programmes, but a copper model at the scale 1:30 – which had to withstand earthquake simulations on a vibrating table – was also hand-welded. The structural system is exceedingly complex, yet highly elastic. At the same time, it is robust and highly redundant. If we were to cut through a row of the most important steel beams, the building would not collapse; the loads would be redistributed by the net structure. With respect to evacuation time, too, the building’s circuit principle proves to be a major advantage.
Detail: During construction the towers went up separately. Was it difficult to get them to meet at the calculated location?
Scheeren: December 8, 2007, was the decisive day. The linking beams had to be mounted early in the morning, before sunrise, in order to ensure that solar radiation did not cause divergent stresses in building components which are otherwise encased in the structural framework.
Detail: Upon first glance the facade structure appears arbitrary. Which criteria determined how the diagonals are distributed?
Scheeren: What you see is the actual steel structure, which was arrived at analytically. The beauty of it is that the seemingly irrational image is completely rational. We wanted this highly unusual structural figure to be discernible on the exterior. The pattern that is now visible on the facade evolved over time through the dynamic analysis. We initially explored an evenly distributed diagonal structure with four-storey-high, rhombus-shaped fields of tubular steel. The analysis of all of its different load requirements shows that certain parts of this structure are subject to greater force flow than others. The simplest strategy would have been to dimension each beam according to the largest possible single load. But it would have required twice the amount of steel. In addition, the building would have become so rigid that it could not have withstood an earthquake for lack of elasticity. The second possibility would have been to dimension each beam individually so that it can optimally resist the forces. But the large number of steel sections would have been unmanageable. In the end, the solution was more intuitive: We simply concentrated the diagonals – creating a denser network – where the stresses are greatest, and in less stressed areas, diagonals were removed. I think that the irregularities which result slightly deconstruct the mega-form, which is crucial visually.
Detail: Are you using – as is still common in China – single panes of glass?
Scheeren: The facade’s solar performance – with its double glazing, low-e-coatings and other high-performance interlayers – is excellent, which also means that the glass didn’t have to be toned; the colour of the daylight entering the building is true to life.
Detail: What role does sustainability play?
Scheeren: Over and above the glazing values, the facade-to-floor-area ratio is extremely efficient. One central energy plant serves both CCTV and the neighbouring Television Cultural Conference Center, and can thus work more efficiently than separate systems would. We also worked in close cooperation with the authorities on a direct subterranean link from the entrance lobby to the subway to limit the car traffic on the site and to promote the use of public transportation.
Detail: Right next to CCTV you are also building the above-mentioned Television Cultural Conference Center with a five-star hotel and a 1500-seat experimental theatre. The placement of the two buildings appears random. Is there a master concept?
Scheeren: Both buildings aim at dialectic dissimilarity. CCTV is a steel construct with extremely clear geometry, TVCC a nearly formless concrete entity in a zinc envelope that has a completely different character. There are, nevertheless, aspects which link the two. TVCC’s height, with its vertical, 100-metre-high atrium, corresponds to the lower edge of CCTV’s cantilever. But there are other issues beyond the different forms: proportionality is particularly important, as is the multi-faceted, urbanistic building massing.
Detail: How were the buildings’ scales determined?
Scheeren: The 16-lane, partially elevated, third ring street on which these buildings are situated establishes a scale which would be inconceivable in Europe. CCTV is one of the largest buildings ever erected, and yet it doesn’t always seem large in this setting.
Detail: Can your concept’s openness also be experienced by the general public?
Scheeren: The public components which we have included were part of the programme as stated in the competition brief. But we wanted to go even further and proposed a public path – the Visitor Loop – through the main building. We wanted to seize the opportunity to house an entire television station in a single building and to make it possible to experience it as such. The client made more than 20 000 square metres available for the general public. This Visitor Loop dips below the entrance lobby into the production studios, provides glimpses into the directors and actors’ spaces and the central transmitting stations. Then it proceeds, via elevator, up to a media museum in the cantilever, where there is a view 162 metres straight down through three glazed openings in the floor.
Detail: Aren’t you concerned that this demonstration of openness could be used as a smokescreen for continued censorship?
Scheeren: I think we need to evaluate the overall development process, a complicated jockeying-for-position between the progressive forces and the more apprehensive ones endeavouring to preserve stability. I hope that our work contributes to a positive development. Our presence in Beijing is also an attempt to better understand it all, but perhaps also to be better able to react to it.
