Icon and Ideology: Koolhaas in Beijing and the CCTV Headquarters

KOOLHAAS IN BEIJING
C.B. Johnson

This text originally appeared in Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts (John Macarthur and Andrew Leach, eds, Gent: A&S, 2008) under the title ‘Icon and Ideology’ and, updated, in Modernity without a Project: Essay on the Void Called Contemporary (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2014).

In November 2006 the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) department of design and architecture held an exhibition entitled OMA in Beijing: China Central Television Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren. The exhibition, like most of the MoMA’s curatorial projects, continued in the line of the ideology of the autonomy of innovation, and the autonomy of the aesthetic. Descriptions of the kind the MoMA puts forth exist in the service of a fundamental aim: namely, to shift the aesthetic into the realm of the Absolute, which stands alone as incomparable. The function of the MoMA’s exhibit was to enshrine the CCTV project with the merits of artistry above possible economic, political, and other extra-aesthetic qualities that the institution may be willing to mention in passing but ultimately rejects as subordinate to the advancement of art. For MoMA, according to the show’s curatorial blurb, the CCTV project is significant for its status as “one of the most visionary undertakings in the history of modern architecture.” To be sure, the reification of the aesthetic is a convenient way of not having to talk about the unsavoury and authoritarian nature of the client, who undoubtedly has intentions to rock the world far beyond that of the immediacy of the built object easily submitted to visual circulation. The image of the object itself, however, does have an important function that serves the institution and the state; the architecture provided by the OMA is a formal rendering of power, I argue, in both the actual constructed space of the city and within the economy of image. CCTV is not an exception among instances of spectacle architecture: it gives form to an otherwise diffuse and centreless power.

This chapter is not about the MoMA exhibition, but the use to which the institution – and other cultural sites – has put the image of the new CCTV headquarters; a deployment that is pre-empted by, or formatted into, the very construction of the building, and the

relative freedom that star architects have to focus on the design of shape, icon and landmark at the expense of program and all forms of economic and political consequences that the development of a work of architecture such as CCTV can possibly have. The CCTV project is about the conspicuous display of power, pure and simple, and Koolhaas and the OMA are its collaborators.

The OMA and China are aware that media represents power and that control of the image in contemporaneity may mean control of reality. The deceptively classical symmetry of the company’s dualism, OMA/AMO, is focused, on the one hand, on architecture, that is, designing and producing buildings, and on the other, anti-architecture, that is, taking architecture beyond itself in the form of a think tank. In Bruce Sterling’s words, AMO is “devoted to the virtual” (167). Sterling draws a distinction between OMA and AMO as that between, respectively, physical buildings and “information.” Between these two realms of practice, Sterling argued, “there is less and less distinction to be made”: physical buildings are frequently designed on computer screens and information – unruly and sprawling in the contemporary world – “cries out for shelter and disciplined organisation.” This may be the case, but Sterling’s simplification is drastic. Above all, what the construction of CCTV might be called upon to illustrate is the incredible disjuncture between the output of AMO and OMA; the critical work of the AMO is not continued in the buildings. The ideas in each interact, but they are not illustrative of each other.

The OMA, since its initial success in the 1990s, has accepted increasingly bigger and more ambitious individual building projects. CCTV is perhaps the most visible; it is certainly the largest, itself a thesis in bigness. Located in Beijing’s new CBD, the CCTV is a megastructure encompassing approximately 558,000 square metres of floor-space designed as the new headquarters for China’s state television broadcaster. While CCTV is an icon of instantaneity, it carries with it a longevity that the Olympic buildings, conceived in the same era, do not. CCTV was not technically part of the 2008 Olympic redevelopment of the city but it was timed to be complete for use at the Olympics of that year. As a building, its manifest innovation is to provide the entire process of TV-making – news and broadcasting, administration and offices, services, research, education, program production – in a continuous loop of interconnected activities. Two towers rise from a common platform and

[I]oin at the top to create a cantilevered penthouse for the management. A new icon is formed: not the predictable 2-dimensional tower “soaring” skyward, but a truly 3-dimensional experience, a canopy that symbolically embraces the entire population: an instant icon that proclaims a new phase in Chinese confidence.

(Koolhaas 2004a, 489)

A number of themes emerge with the new building that resonate with the modern and with that different, but related phenomenon, modernisation: the Utopian expenditure of a great metamorphosis of form (the loop) and the suddenness of its arrival. Instantaneity is a key issue at work in the new development if we are to begin to grasp this immense – and uniquely national – foregrounding of the modern spirit. Modernisation is, as Jameson has argued (2002, 166), more a repetition than an invention, that can only be performed today with immense resources of historical self-awareness.

The building itself was said to contribute to the “coherence” of the organisation and, in a physical chain of interdependence of departments, to offer “solidarity” instead of isolation between the parts of the organisation (previously, they were distributed randomly and generically across the city). The loop is conceived as a public space; something the old headquarters did not have: visitors are admitted and can “freely” circulate within its secured interior, separated off from the private spaces of production. But, for this ideology, CCTV represents a limit, as Murray Fraser has argued. Chinese Central Television headquarters,

contains a public right of way snaking through its contorted form [that] does not as such challenge the notorious secrecy and authoritarianism of that state-controlled institution. It offers at best an isolated symbol of critique, rather than a critical architecture that can hint at changes in meaning through radical aesthetics and a thoroughgoing spatial manipulation of the building programme.

(333-4)

This is basically compiling the known and the obvious. CCTV presents a contradiction: it does not seem to advance the AMO’s project to take architecture beyond itself; rather, it affirms the continued existence of the individual building. It goes against the discourse pouring out of both Koolhaas and the AMO. It is a massive built object, affirming the most classical, heroic, monumental aspect of the discipline. It is also a testament to the linked nature of the OMA and AMO. They fuel each other.

The OMA has tended to build structures that not simply shelter but seek to intervene and invent conditions of new possibility. In developing a reading of CCTV I will suggest Koolhaas’ debt not to the radically different Mies van der Rohe or the Japanese Metabolists (oft-cited precursors) but to Yamasaki. CCTV is a useful example for invoking a connection between late modernism (not postmodernism) and the OMA. CCTV was designed by the OMA with Ole Scheeren, a Koolhaas disciple and partner, heading the project. It is an aggressively abstract building, not unlike Yamasaki’s twin WTC towers (1972-2001) in this respect. This comparison is legitimated by Koolhaas’ own constant gestures to the status of Yamasaki’s WTC. Koolhaas, obsessed with New York City (witness Delirious New York) and, more recently, the twin towers, praised the fact that they were “abstract and structurally daring.” Koolhaas also noted that “twinning [was] their only genius” (2004b, 237). Comparably, the “genius” of the CCTV design lies in its monumental form of the continuous loop, daring in its simplicity, its shape outlining a massive void.

Koolhaas has wrapped CCTV in a mythos of meaning involving the late WTC. As Koolhaas narrates the project, CCTV’s form responds to the need for a new architectural possibility in the post-9/11 world, wherein the skyscraper no longer has the same meaning. We have already considered Enwezor’s argument about the “stage of uncertainty” that the form of the skyscraper has entered (2003, 107). If, in 1972, the completion of Yamasaki’s World Trade Centre signalled the perfection of the skyscraper, then the genre was left with no future but replication; it had nowhere to go. As I have already argued, the WTC was conceived as a big centralisation machine; arborescent, not rhizomatic.

The WTC can be read as an attempt to symbolise control, or as a substitute for control in a situation of uncertainty, as it gave concrete form to America’s central role within late or multinational capitalism. CCTV was conceived at the moment of the new WTC competition, in 2002, “not in the back-ward looking USA, but in the parallel universe of China” (Koolhaas, 2004f, 515). Koolhaas justified the OMA’s decision not to participate in the WTC competition and to bid for China instead, as one that favoured the Utopian over the nostalgic or the future (China) over the past (the US). The WTC was identified with memorialisation and the CCTV, with China (and the world’s largest market) having recently joined the World Trade Organisation, was identified with the opportunity to articulate and symbolise that country as a new world superpower. The decision is reduced to signature Koolhaas minimalism in the slogan used in Content: “Go East.”

The CCTV building is a spectacle-event designed to engineer spectacle-events, that is, to monopolise the gaze of huge televisual markets, internal to China and external in the world market. The OMA did not arrive in China from out of Europe and North America and start building in a state of disorientation. An information project preceded design. With OMA/AMO in China, the map preceded the territory, because the Harvard Project on the City began in China, in 1994, with pure investigative research, which appears to have paid off (if built execution is the secret Utopia of AMO). AMO, as an ideological project, grasps that information is the rule of the day – compiling disinterested data, or content, to be retroactivated as capital in potential, not-yet conceived of future situations; almost as a kind of curriculum vitae for the future.

The titles alone of the big Koolhaas volumes are a giveaway of the historical transformation at stake here. The OMA participates in, even actively promotes, the transition from Communism to Consumer Capitalism, especially in the country’s First Special Economic Zones (Shenzhen and Zhuhai became official labs for free-market experiment under Deng). Koolhaas’ answer to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, his own Big Red Book Great Leap Forward (with ironic gold coins stamped on the cover) charts the building boom in China’s Pearl River Delta. (It perhaps suggestive that Koolhaas’ is a book, and red, yet unlike Mao’s infamous volume, it is too heavy to wave or carry in one’s pocket.) The companion volume, Guide to Shopping, charts the now centuries-long rise of arcades, commercial plazas, and shopping malls that have become late capitalism’s default mode of social space and key players in the post-war mutation of cities. In less than ten years, the OMA won the CCTV project for Beijing, the Office’s biggest commission.

The building was timed to circulate as an image of power at the very moment that China occupied the world stage as host of the Olympics. It is a building designed to project both inward to China and outward to the international community, as a sign of technological daring and state power; the Chinese media are among the least free and most censored in the world. Knut Birkholz reminds us that the history of architecture is, to a great extent, the structural demonstration of power, and CCTV is no exception:

The reverse side to bigness and the “absence of characteristics” – irrelevance – appears to be something that Koolhaas does not fear. But the hybrid form that he so values metamorphoses everything it includes all too easily into a monotonous unity; the accumulated architectural effects compete for

attention, like the metropolises, shopping malls, television programs and those architectural publications that must court an audience with their nice pictures. Should an especially beautiful building arise in Beijing, which is the express intention of Koolhaas, then this would be pure and simple prettification of the brutality of its surroundings. These surroundings make the entire project ugly in the true sense of the word, and whoever has good reason to hate the power of the state of China might follow a primordial reflex by directing their loathing against the new icon. (Birkholz 2006)

The OMA, then, may have provided the Chinese masses with a kind of Bastille to storm. Icons in the current age have become useful – for insurgents, terrorists, the mass media, and tourists alike – for their target potential; a point brought home by Smith in The Architecture of Aftermath, in which he argues that the WTC towers were “more than symbols” and not a spectacular confirmation of postmodern analyses in which appearance triumphed over reality but “the actual buildings were central, tangible embodiments of the complex functions that they housed, the most visible point of concentration of the complex array of powers associated with them” (2006, 7). Buildings of this kind, world trade centres or mass media production machines, designed for global circulation as image, become images of power, but are also already, centralising machines that maintain power. Power, diffuse and mobile like information or digital light, needs architecture to present itself in the real, to give it form and place. Architecture in the contemporary continues to provide shelter, as architecture has always done, but of another kind, not that of human protection from the elements, but that of the vastly different “wilderness” of our time, the heterogeneous information disorder.

Birkholz outlines the politically repressive context in which the OMA has agreed to build, citing the Human Rights Watch on China:

Infringements against human rights in the form of violence against political dissidents, against representatives of various religious organisations, against those who provide support to the HIV infected or those suffering from AIDS, against Muslim minorities labelled as separatists in Xinjiang, against those who protest the illegal occupation of Tibet...Freedom of assembly exists nowhere, strikes are smashed, justice is absent from the courts. Censorship rules supreme in all the mass media and, to a massive extent, on the Internet too. (Birkholz 2006)

I wish to conclude on a note that suggests that an oppositional architecture is possible, despite the limitations of CCTV. One way of going about this will be an insistence on the use

of architecture in posing issues. Architecture, then, might be rethought as an open resource useful to those not directly in the art or business of development; a resource to inform the critical imagination. The AMO’s briefs have tended to be focused around rethinking the definition of “architecture”, which involves going beyond the discipline of architecture as the practice of constructing buildings. Architecture is a critical modality per se, a discipline capable of migration to the world outside of the discipline. One of the interesting implications of the current state of affairs is that at the exact moment of architecture’s incredible triumph – more construction is currently underway globally that at any point in history – physical buildings themselves, the CCTV headquarters being no exception, have become the questionable centre of the field.

As the OMA sees it, one of the constant problems for architectural research when undertaken by architects is that it is reified by the particular project or client’s interests and is stopped short of launching its own unique course. This is undoubtedly very frustrating for architects. The knowledge produced by architect for client, the argument goes, is the “opposite of an agenda” based on the architect’s random sequence of commissions that it attains largely ad hoc from the system and its current needs and aims, whatever they might be. The function of a company such as AMO is crucial in this regard and has much to recommend it, although the model has not been widely adopted by architecture firms. Such a model is essential in taking the theorist from the materiality of the building to the conceptual, to the imagined, to the intangible, and to the reloading of agendas.

For a long time the most interesting architects have tended to be those engaged not simply with designing and building but writing. Writing is a way of overcoming the problem of waiting for commissions. In periods of waiting critically minded architects have regeared their attention toward propaganda. In the high modernist era, architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and, to some extent, Walter Groplus, offered parallel universes of architectural imagination to their built projects, in treatises and manifestoes written variously to enlighten or obscure, sensitize or desensitize, reveal or push the limits and contents of what the discipline of architecture can be.

In this way, a generation before Koolhaas, in America, Robert Venturi changed the direction of architectural thought, not through buildings but through manifestoes: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and, especially, Learning from Las Vegas. At the most challenging, architectural discourse of this kind admirably seeks to redefine the imaginative

and conceptual limits of what is too often a mundane practice of providing spaces for the powers that be and repeating that which already exists. The manifesto makes connections: unravelling visions of architecture into other disciplines or forms of culture, emphasising revolutionary potentials.

Recently in the history of architecture, Koolhaas and the OMA introduced a new kind of product/project: the big book publication, which is a way of launching research beyond the reifications from above imposed by clients. For Koolhaas, the “liberation” of publishing, as opposed to functional, slow and expensive construction, equals the possibility of rethinking or repurposing architecture as a form of relationship to the contemporary city. In 1995, S,M,L,XL, totalling some 1376 pages, was the inaugural text of this “genre”, and the results of the Harvard Project on the City in China continued strong in its footsteps. These were manifestations of what might be called “Bigness by other means” and, in Hal Foster’s terms, are “not coffee-table books, they are coffee tables” (2002, 22). They were not supplements to building or even straightforward interpretations but active, autonomous projects. The new books might be seen as architectural visions in their own right. We can reconceive architecture not as common sense individual buildings, or as mere style, but as organisational structures in their attempts to give form to an aspect of today’s wilderness of information in all its “unthinkable complexity”, in William Gibson’s sense.

Koolhaas and the OMA have achieved some of the most high profile built products of the last two decades. A short list of the OMA’s “random sequence of commissions” would include: the redevelopment of Eurolille, the Seattle Public Library, the Guggenheim in Las Vegas and Guggenheim-Hermitage, Prada in New York, Casa da Musica in Porto, CCTV in Beijing, and a from-scratch “city” or city-simulation in Dubai (on hold due to the money crash). Koolhaas has worked in each case on the construction of narrative and concept around each of the buildings, generating occasionally compelling “scripts” for architecture. Whatever the status of Koolhaas as an architect, in the final analysis, he and his office are ambiguous entities. He is a committed theorist throughout his journey, which has helped highlight the contemporary intersection at architecture and the contemporary city. The originality of OMA derives from the fact that Koolhaas operates within the disciplinary binds of “architecture”, but he is not strictly an architect. He has posed as a post-critical architect, that is, one who makes a critique only by participating in the system that one wishes to oppose. He does not see a dialectical outside, but only the inextricability of criticism and participation. The end to

which this takes us, however, is far from heroic, in the sense that designing high tech infrastructure and architecture for totalitarian capitalism offers an alarming picture of the direction not simply of architecture but of the world. Architects are in a position to refuse; in fact, a politics of refusal and refusing to build may occasionally be the more radical option in the present political climate.

Notes

Birkholz, Knut. 2006. “CCTV or: Architecture Meets Life.” Graz Architecture Magazine 03: 170–185.

Enwezor, Okwui. 2003. “Terminal Modernity: Rem Koolhaas’ Discourse on Entropy.” In What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, ed. Veronique Patteeuw, 103–119. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute.

Foster, Hal. 2003. “Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes).” London: Verso.

Fraser, Murray. 2007. “Beyond Koolhaas.” In Critical Architecture, eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathon Hill, Murray Fraser, and Mark Dorrian, 332–334. London: Routledge.

Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso.

Koolhaas, Rem. 2004a. “CCTV.” In Content, ed. Brendan McGetrick, 482-503. New York: Taschen.

Koolhaas, Rem. 2004b. “White Briefs Against Filth: The Waning Power of New York.” In Content, ed. Brendan McGetrick, 236–239. New York: Taschen.

Smith, Terry. 2006. The Architecture of Aftermath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sterling, Bruce. 2003. “A User’s Guide to AMO.” In What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, ed. Veronique Patteeuw, 167–76. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute.