In 1949, the establish of the new government, released China from its history, and setup a “new order”. Historical buildings were demolished to give way to new industrial workshops and factories and four-hundred-year old city wall was knocked down to construct Beijing’s 2nd-Ring Road etc. The development of the city is, to some extend, single sided and dominated by strong political power. The CCTV tower is a prefect metaphor for the Beijing’s development in the last 60 years. The mega-structure, the offensive form, and the loudness of the building has ideally represented the strength of a communist government that directs the development of Beijing, leads the growth of its economy and even controlled the broadcasting of media.
The client of this project, China Central Television or Chinese Central Television (中国中央电视台), commonly abbreviated as CCTV, is the major state television broadcaster in mainland China. CCTV has a network of 19 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers, most of which, are in Mainland China. This station is one of the official mouthpieces of the Chinese government, and reports directly to high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central Propaganda Department. It is commonly believed that the CCTV is the biggest and most powerful media in this country, is both politically and financially enabled Koolhaas to finish this amazing media center. Without this unique historical and contextual background, this project will almost become a mission impossible.
In Robert Venturi’s Lesson from Las Vegas, the renewal of signage and symbol denotes the limitation of architectural abstraction. Largely negated by the Modernist movement, the bold and explicit architectural expression of Las Vegas embodies the spirit of individualism and consumerism. The complex programs and contexts of today require innovative combination of media beyond the purer architectural triad, ‘form’ and ‘light’ at the service of ‘space’. In the realm of contemporary consumerism, iconic structures such as the Chrysler Building and GM RenCen is not much different from Venturi’s “Ducks”, or decorated sheds.
And yet, the architecture around New York’s Times Square or Tokyo’s Shibuya is nothing remotely close to the expressiveness of “Ducks”. The blandness and their deliberate attempt to dissolve behind the chaos of electronic billboards relegate architecture to mere square footage of horizontal and vertical rental spaces. The fluid evolution of signage and symbol is only projected to accelerate with the innovations in social networking and virtual communication in the past decade. The spread of personal electronic and mobile technology from Google map, Blackberry to Yelp all alters the way Americans consumers interact with their physical environments.
The nascent ascension of e-commerce is fundamentally changing the meaning of branding and commercial advertising. Behavioral targeting and contextual advertising in the virtual world have yet to solicit an architectural response to harness the economic potential of this new form of communication. Web portals such as Amazon and Craigslist were both vilified as a threat to the vitality of urban community, but they invariably provide us with new insights beyond the confine of our neighborhood and enhance the inter-connectivity among various parts of our cities. Most recently, companies like Groupon were set out not to shield us within the virtual bubble of mail ordering but to promote the rediscovery of new outlets within our community. The goal of my research is to speculate and experiment the physical (and architectural) response to this new retail and advertising landscape.
