The CCTV
Headquarters or China Central Television
Headquarters is a 234 metre (768 ft), 51 story skyscraper on
East Third Ring Road, Guanghua Road in the Beijing Central Business
District (CBD). The tower serves as headquarters for China Central
Television (CCTV) that was formerly at the old China Central
Television Building located at 11 Fuxin Road some 15 km (9.3 mi)
to the west. Groundbreaking took place on 1 June 2004 and the building's facade
was completed in January 2008. After the construction was delayed by a fire
that engulfed the adjacent Television Cultural Center in February
2009, the headquarters was completed in May 2012. The CCTV Headquarters
won the 2013 Best Tall Building Worldwide from the Council on Tall
Buildings and Urban Habitat.
The main building is not a traditional tower, but a
loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 473,000 m2 (5,090,000 sq ft)
of floor space, creating an irregular grid on the building's facade with an
open center. The construction of the building is considered to be a structural
challenge, especially because it is in a seismic zone. Rem Koolhaas has
said the building "could never have been conceived by the Chinese and
could never have been built by Europeans.
The building was built in three buildings that were
joined to become one and a half buildings on 30 May 2007. In order not to lock
in structural differentials this connection was scheduled in the early morning
when the steel in the two towers cooled to the same temperature. The CCTV
building was part of a media park intended to form a landscape of public
entertainment, outdoor filming areas, and production studios as an extension of
the central green axis of the CBD.
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture won
the contract from the Beijing International Tendering Co. to
construct the CCTV Headquarters and the Television Cultural Center by
its side on 1 January 2002, after winning an international design
competition. The jury included architect Arata Isozaki and
critic Charles Jencks. It is among the first of 300 new towers in the
new Beijing CBD. Administration, news, broadcasting, and program
production offices and studios are all contained inside.
