Icon and Ideology: Koolhaas in Beijing and the CCTV Headquarters

Author: C.B. Johnson
Year: 2008 (updated 2014 in Modernity without a Project: Essay on the Void Called Contemporary)
Source type: chapter (in Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts, eds. Macarthur & Leach)
Raw file: raw/articles/johnson-icon-ideology-spectacle.md

Summary

Johnson provides a critical analysis of OMA's CCTV Headquarters in Beijing as exemplifying spectacle architecture that gives "form to an otherwise diffuse and centreless power." The chapter argues that the MoMA exhibition aestheticized the building while ignoring its authoritarian client and political context. Johnson traces how OMA/AMO operates — OMA designing physical buildings, AMO as "anti-architecture" think tank "devoted to the virtual" — but notes a "disjuncture" between AMO's critical work and OMA's built projects. CCTV is read as a "spectacle-event designed to engineer spectacle-events," timed for the 2008 Olympics to project Chinese state power. Johnson connects CCTV to late modernism (Yamasaki's WTC) rather than postmodernism, and critiques Koolhaas's "post-critical" position of participating in systems one wishes to oppose. The article concludes by suggesting a "politics of refusal" — that architects should sometimes refuse commissions as a radical option.

Key Claims

• MoMA's aestheticization: The MoMA exhibition "continued in the line of the ideology of the autonomy of innovation, and the autonomy of the aesthetic" — shifting "the aesthetic into the realm of the Absolute, which stands alone as incomparable." This reification is "a convenient way of not having to talk about the unsavoury and authoritarian nature of the client."

• Architecture as formal rendering of power: "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."

• OMA/AMO dualism: OMA designs buildings; AMO is "anti-architecture," a think tank "devoted to the virtual" (Sterling). "Between these two realms of practice... 'there is less and less distinction to be made'." But "the incredible disjuncture between the output of AMO and OMA" means "the critical work of the AMO is not continued in the buildings."

• CCTV as thesis in bigness: 558,000 square meters, "a megastructure encompassing... 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 common platform and join at top in cantilevered penthouse.

• The loop as icon: "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).

• Instantaneity and modernization: "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."

• False public space: The loop is "conceived as a public space" where visitors can "'freely' circulate within its secured interior." But Murray Fraser argues it "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."

• Contradiction with AMO discourse: CCTV "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."

• Connection to Yamasaki's WTC: Johnson suggests Koolhaas's debt is to Yamasaki (not Mies or Metabolists). CCTV is "aggressively abstract... not unlike Yamasaki's twin WTC towers." Koolhaas praised WTC as "abstract and structurally daring" and noted "twinning [was] their only genius." CCTV's genius is "its monumental form of the continuous loop, daring in its simplicity, its shape outlining a massive void."

• Post-9/11 meaning: CCTV responds to "the need for a new architectural possibility in the post-9/11 world, wherein the skyscraper no longer has the same meaning." WTC was "perfection of the skyscraper" leaving "nowhere to go but replication." CCTV was conceived in 2002 "not in the back-ward looking USA, but in the parallel universe of China." Koolhaas: "Go East."

• Spectacle-event: "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."

• OMA promotes Communism to Consumer Capitalism transition: OMA's Harvard Project on the City began in China in 1994. Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas's "answer to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book") charts the Pearl River Delta building boom. 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."

• Timed for Olympics: "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."

• Power needs architecture: "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... not that of human protection from the elements, but that of the vastly different 'wilderness' of our time, the heterogeneous information disorder."

• Human rights context: Birkholz cites Human Rights Watch on China: "violence against political dissidents... Muslim minorities labelled as separatists in Xinjiang... illegal occupation of Tibet... Freedom of assembly exists nowhere, strikes are smashed, justice is absent from the courts. Censorship rules supreme."

• Icons as targets: "Icons in the current age have become useful – for insurgents, terrorists, the mass media, and tourists alike – for their target potential." WTC towers were "'more than symbols'... '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'" (Smith).

• Post-critical architecture: 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."

• Politics of refusal: "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."

Connections

Concepts: spectacle, iconic-architecture
Authors: koolhaas-rem
Debates: spectacle-vs-function
Related source notes: sklair-towards-understanding-architectural-iconicity, jones-2009-putting-architecture-social-place

Direct Quotes

"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."

"The OMA and China are aware that media represents power and that control of the image in contemporaneity may mean control of reality."

"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."

"Power, diffuse and mobile like information or digital light, needs architecture to present itself in the real, to give it form and place."

"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."

"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."

Open Questions

• How does Johnson's critique of Koolhaas's "post-critical" position relate to the wiki's "Fate of Critical Architecture" synthesis? Is this evidence that critique is obsolete, or that post-critical collusion is a betrayal?
• What is the relationship between Johnson's "spectacle-event" and Debord's spectacle? Is CCTV the spectacle concretized as state power?
• How does the "politics of refusal" connect to the Situationist détournement — is refusal a form of negation that the SI would endorse?
• Does the empirical finding "visuality peaks, function lasts" (Alaily-Mattar 2025) apply to CCTV — will its visual impact outlast its function as a media production machine?