From The Financial Times:
In a carefully choreographed pre-dawn operation last weekend, the huge sloping twin towers of Beijing’s new CCTV building were bolted together to create what will eventually be a 70-metre-long overhang at a height of 160m. It was, says the architect in charge Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), a moment of “early-morning intimacy”, for the steel towers, which each weigh somewhere around 50,000 tonnes.
Critics, however, see little intimacy either in the new CCTV building or in the other architectural behemoths taking shape across the Chinese capital ahead of next year’s Olympic Games. Buildings such as CCTV, the newly completed titanium-domed National Centre for the Performing Arts, and Olympic venues such as the tangled-steel “Bird’s Nest” stadium designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron are making headlines around the world. But Yu Kongjian, professor of urban planning and landscape architecture at Peking University, says they set a bad example of wasteful construction in a resource-poor developing nation. [Full Text]
