The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · the headquarters of a state broadcaster: administration, news, production, broadcasting and studios in one building · two towers rising from a common base of about nine storeys and leaning outward, joined at the top by an L-shaped overhang of roughly nine to thirteen storeys that cantilevers about 75 metres, its free corner well over 150 metres above the plaza, so that the whole is one continuous tube bent into a loop · a perimeter tube of steel and composite, its bracing expressed on the façade as an irregular diagrid behind dark grey glass · 234 metres high · the Central Business District, Beijing · international competition 2002; the two halves of the overhang joined December 2008; complete about 2012 · OMA, with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren as partners in charge, Arup as structural and services engineers and the East China Architectural Design and Research Institute as local design institute, for China Central Television · scored as the building as it stands, with its plaza and podium
Mode
Office, newsroom and studio building as a single figure; the skyscraper argued against in the form of a skyscraper
Mythos
The loop, the circuit that returns on itself, built; the gate over a threshold, seen but not passed through; the tower of pride, evoked by the lean and the hanging mass
Phase
Competition 2002; the overhang joined December 2008; the companion building next door gutted by fire in February 2009; complete about 2012 and in use by the broadcaster since; officially disfavoured as a type from about 2014
Presentation
Two towers on a common base of studios, leaning outward and joined at the top by a cantilevered overhang; a perimeter tube of steel and composite under dark grey glass, its bracing an irregular diagrid of graded density
Register
Vertigo and the threat of weight; a disquiet of balance more than joy; a figure that turns as the viewer moves round it
Scale
One institution and its whole process of making, 234 metres high, on the skyline of a new business district
Governing Proposition
A state broadcaster whose departments stood scattered across a capital is gathered into one building, and its architects refuse the tower: two leaning shafts rise from a common base and are joined at the top by a block that hangs over the plaza, so that the whole is one tube bent into a closed loop. The wager is that the sequence of television making can be built as a circuit, that a skyscraper can turn away from the race for height, and that a structure carrying so improbable a figure can show its forces on its skin.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The tall office building had one shape for a century. From Chicago and New York it ran, as a vertical extrusion of a floor plate, to the towers going up in Shanghai and Dubai in the same years as this one: a race upward, each new tower measured against the last by its height. Beside that line ran another, on paper only. In the 1920s El Lissitzky drew the Wolkenbügel, horizontal skyscrapers held up on legs over the streets of Moscow. In Delirious New York (1978) Rem Koolhaas made the skyscraper his subject and his quarrel, and OMA’s earlier projects worked at the same question.
The client was China Central Television, the state broadcaster, whose departments stood scattered across Beijing. The brief was to gather them into one building in the new Central Business District: administration, news, production, broadcasting and studios. An international competition was held in 2002, and OMA’s scheme was chosen. Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren were the partners in charge, Scheeren leading the work in Beijing; Arup were the structural and services engineers, with Cecil Balmond among the early engineering partners; and the East China Architectural Design and Research Institute was the local design institute. The building is credited to them together, and the collaboration is not charged.
The answer to the brief was a refusal. Instead of a tower to be measured against the towers round it, the scheme took the height a broadcaster needed and bent it back on itself. Two towers would rise from a common base and lean outward, and at the top a block would join them, so that the building became one continuous tube closed into a loop. What Lissitzky had drawn on paper eighty years before would be built, at a height of more than 150 metres, in a seismic zone.
Movement II
The building is 234 metres high. Its base, of about nine storeys, holds the studios and stands as a low block on the plaza. From it the two towers rise, each leaning outward from the vertical, and at the top an L-shaped overhang of roughly nine to thirteen storeys joins them. The overhang cantilevers about 75 metres from the towers, and its corner hangs free over the plaza, well over 150 metres up, with nothing under it. Seen in plan, base and overhang make two halves of a square ring, one on the ground and one in the air, and the leaning towers join them at opposite corners.
No two approaches show the same building. From one side the figure is a gate, two legs and a lintel; from another a leaning wedge; from a third a broken ring. A drive along the Third Ring Road makes it turn. The dark grey glass holds the bracing behind it as a visible net, and at dusk the net reads more strongly than the glass. The figure answers the towers of the business district round it by declining their contest: it has height, and spends it in a closed shape rather than a point.
The loop is the diagram of the brief. The sequence of television making is set out as a continuous circuit: the studios in the base, production and news rising through the towers, management set in the overhang above, joining the two halves of the work. Departments that had stood apart in the city were to see and pass one another in one ring. That is the building’s claim on use, and its strongest argument for necessity. What yields to the subtractive test is the overhang itself: its floors could sit in either tower, and the rooms would serve in two straight towers. The loop is required by the idea of the building, and the idea by the client’s wish for an image.
Movement III
The structure is a perimeter tube of steel and composite, and it carries the whole loop as one structure: base, both towers and the overhang are a single bent tube. Its bracing is expressed on the façade as an irregular diagrid, and the diagrid is not a pattern applied to the skin but the result of analysis. Where the forces are high, near the base and at the roots of the cantilever, the members are dense; where little is asked of them, the net opens. The skin is a diagram of the forces it carries.
The making was done beyond the codes of the day. The behaviour of such a structure lay outside what the codes provided for, and the design passed through special expert review in China. The towers were built leaning, with their settlement and deflection foreseen. The overhang was built out from the top of each tower toward the other, two cantilevers reaching across the gap, and in December 2008 the two halves were joined. Until then the building was two leaning towers with arms; from that month it was one structure, and the loop was closed.
The command is real and the costs are real. A great quantity of steel was spent to make a gesture stand, a cost no programme required, and the dark glazing that lets the bracing show at a distance makes the building heavy and opaque at close range. One law governs the exterior from the base to the free corner of the overhang: the continuous tube and its visible physics. Inside, a second law governs, the ordinary office and studio floor, which knows nothing of the loop but its plate; and the plaza and podium are handled with less conviction than the tube.
Movement IV
On the same site the architects built a companion: the Television Cultural Center, with a hotel and a theatre. On 9 February 2009, the night of the Lantern Festival, it was gutted by fire, while the loop beside it stood with its overhang newly joined. The companion was later completed. It is context to this building and is not scored with it; nothing of the headquarters was lost in the fire.
The commission was argued over from the start, and the argument has not closed. A European office and an English engineering firm were building the national broadcaster of an authoritarian state in the years of the Beijing Olympics, and OMA’s reputation was staked, in public, on the work. The building disclosed that bargain of the Western avant-garde with such a client, and the disclosure belongs more to the event of the commission than to the form.
The form discloses something of its own. A state broadcaster’s power is shown as a single circuit of production, every department inside one ring that leads back to itself: a true image of a closed system of information, whether or not it was meant as one. The register of the building is of the same kind. Beneath the overhang, a block of many storeys hangs over the plaza with nothing under its corner, and the elevation it gives is vertigo and the threat of weight, a disquiet of balance more than joy.
Movement V
Beijing has its own name for the building. Its popular name, da kucha, means big trousers or underpants, and it has given the loop a comic myth that undercuts the solemn ones. The building suggests a gate from some angles, and Beijing is a city of gates; but no passage through this gate matters, and the arch is a view, not a path. The tower of pride hovers over any building of the kind and is evoked here by the lean and the hanging mass. The myth the building actually builds is the loop.
The design also gave the public a way through. A visitor route, the Loop, was to run through the building to an observation level in the overhang, with glass discs set in its floor looking straight down to the plaza: citizens passing through the state’s broadcaster, the form’s most radical claim on use. Whether that route runs as a regular part of the building’s life could not be established. The building has been in continuous use since about 2012 as the headquarters of China Central Television, for which it was built.
Its reach is real and bounded. It became the emblem of the iconic building in China and of OMA’s turn to very large work, and its engineering, the graded diagrid and the form led by analysis, has been widely taught and followed. But the vertical tower went on, higher than ever, and in China the building’s chief reach has been as the case argued against: official guidance from about 2014 to 2016 discouraged oversized, strange and imported landmark buildings. About fourteen years complete, it stands whole, in use, and bound to the moment that made it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site. The case for necessity is the brief: a broadcaster whose departments stood scattered across Beijing gathered into one building, and the sequence of television making, administration, news, production and broadcasting, with the studios in the base, set out as one continuous circuit, so that the loop is the diagram of the process. The structure is compelled by the form, and the diagrid by the forces. What yields to the subtractive test is the overhang: its floors could sit in either tower, and the cantilever exists to close the figure, at a structural cost no programme required. The lean is chosen, not compelled, and the rooms would serve in two straight towers. Above the cap by a tenth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What can be stated, and holds. The skyscraper need not be a race upward: height can be bent back on itself into a closed figure that refuses the competition of the towers round it, and the building says so to each of them. A state broadcaster’s power is shown as one circuit of production, every department inside a ring that leads back to itself, a true image of a closed system of information whether or not it was meant as one. The commission disclosed the bargain of the Western avant-garde with an authoritarian client in the Olympic years. Held below 8.0: that disclosure was made by the event more than by the form, Koolhaas had written the critique of the tower long before, and much of what the building gives is the mood of a confident moment.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Height is high and of one kind: vertigo and the threat of weight. It comes beneath the overhang, where a block of many storeys hangs over the plaza with nothing under its corner; in a figure that never shows the same silhouette twice, a gate from one side, a leaning wedge from another, a broken loop from a third, so that a drive along the Third Ring Road makes it turn; in the dark glass and the net of bracing at dusk; and, as designed, at the glass discs in the floor of the overhang, looking straight down. The register is dread more than joy, a disquiet of balance. The elevation is concentrated outside, in the overhang seen from below and from a distance, and the working floors within do not carry it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Two archetypes are present, one built and one seen. The built one is the loop, the circuit that returns on itself, a closed ring of making that is structure and circulation, not ornament. The seen one is the gate, the arch over a threshold, which the figure suggests from some angles and which Beijing, a city of gates, reads readily; but no passage through it matters, and the arch is a view, not a path. The tower of pride hovers over any building of the kind and is evoked by the lean and the hanging mass, not built. The popular name has given the building a comic myth that undercuts the solemn one. The particular is kept, but the archetype is thinner in the plan than the figure promises, and the axis stands well below the gate.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the tall office building as a vertical extrusion, the type that ran from Chicago and New York to the towers of Shanghai and Dubai in the same years; behind the departure stands a line of horizontal skyscrapers on paper, from El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel of the 1920s to OMA’s own earlier projects and Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978). The departure: a building of this size bent into a closed three-dimensional loop, leaning, with a cantilever of about 75 metres more than 150 metres up, in a seismic zone. The stake was as large as any building of its decade took: structure beyond the codes of the day, under special expert review, a construction with little precedent, and a reputation staked in public argument. Held below 9.0 because the turn had been drawn on paper for eighty years.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Substitute two straight towers for the loop and the building loses nearly all its image, and its claim that the institution is one continuous process. The overhang sets management above, joining the two halves of the work; the base gathers the studios; the circuit was meant to let departments that once stood apart see and pass one another. How much of this is lived is not established. A large organisation tends to move by lift within its own tower, and whether the public route, the form’s most radical claim on use, runs as a regular part of the building’s life could not be confirmed. What the form demonstrably knows is the image of an institution, and that is less than the form proposed. The axis meets the Universal Minimum exactly.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is short: about fourteen years complete. The building has already yielded to several disciplines: to engineering, on the irregular diagrid as a map of forces and on the closing of the cantilever; to architectural theory, as the most fully built statement of Koolhaas’s long argument with the skyscraper; to politics, in the debate over architects working for the state media of an authoritarian government; to the history of Beijing in the Olympic years; and to the later turn of official taste against strange buildings. The figure changes with the angle of approach, and that rewards return. Held lower because much of the yield concerns the commission and its moment more than what the form holds when the viewer comes back to it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the tall building of its century and, nearer, Chinese building since 1990. The intrinsic force is high: it showed that a tower of this scale could be a closed loop, that structure could be expressed as a field of forces on the skin, and that a skyscraper could refuse the race for height. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of the iconic building in China and of OMA’s turn to very large work; its engineering approach, the graded diagrid and the form led by analysis, has been widely taught and followed; looped and gate-shaped towers came after it. But the tall building did not turn, and in China its chief reach has been as the case argued against, official guidance from about 2014 to 2016 discouraging oversized, strange and imported landmarks.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over a span far short of fifty years. The form is whole: the loop stands complete as designed. The use has been continuous since about 2012 as the headquarters of China Central Television, the purpose it was built for; the public route through the building, part of that use, has not been shown to run as a regular route, and the doubt is charged. The fabric is sound after fourteen years; the fire next door is context and is not charged. A surface fixed to its moment is charged: the building is bound to the Olympic years, to the age of the iconic building and to one institution, and has stood since in official disfavour as a type. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and it is taken.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing. The perimeter tube carries the loop as one structure, and the diagrid is not a pattern applied but the result of analysis, its members thickening and multiplying where load is high and thinning where it is low, so that the skin is a diagram of the forces. The cantilever was built out from both towers and the halves joined in December 2008; the towers were built leaning, with settlement and deflection foreseen; all of it in a seismic zone and under review beyond the codes of the day. The costs are charged: a great quantity of steel spent to make a gesture stand, and dark glazing that makes the building heavy and opaque at close range.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the free corner of the overhang, high over the plaza, and the base of studios set into the ground. One law governs both: the continuous tube, bent in three dimensions, with the density of the diagrid as its visible physics, thick at the base where load gathers and at the roots of the cantilever, open where little is asked. The same law makes the lean of the towers and the hanging mass legible as one system, and nothing on the exterior contradicts it. The range is wide, from ground to sky and from tower to bridge. What bends it: inside, a second law governs, the ordinary office and studio floor, which knows nothing of the loop but its plate; and the plaza and podium are handled with less conviction than the tube.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Five orders are held: the state and its media, a government’s voice gathered into one structure; labour, the whole process of television making set out as a circuit; the city, a figure on the skyline of the new business district answering the towers round it; the global, a European office and an English engineering firm building a national broadcaster in the decade China opened to the world’s architects; and the public, intended in the visitor route and not shown to have been given it. One figure integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the natural order, the sacred, the body except as vertigo, and the history of the site. An office and production building holds one institution at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.7, then The Made at 8.6 and The Sublime at 8.2. A tower of this size bent into a closed loop, leaning, its overhang cantilevered more than 150 metres up in a seismic zone and built beyond the codes of the day, with the stake paid; a structure in which the skin is a diagram of its forces, the diagrid dense where load gathers and open where little is asked; and an elevation of vertigo and weight beneath the hanging corner, in a figure that turns as the viewer moves round it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2, then The Living Form at 7.5. The building holds the state and its media, the labour of television making, the city and the global moment of its commission in one figure, while the household, the natural order, the sacred and the history of the site stay outside; and what the form demonstrably knows is the image of an institution, its claim to change how the institution is lived not shown to be met. Then The Inevitable, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.6: an overhang that yields to the subtractive test, a gate seen but not passed through, and fourteen years of yield that concern the commission more than the form. The axes of consequence, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Imperishable at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, are what hold it below Tier IV. The TWA Flight Center (8.0), another engineered figure for a modern client, stands a tenth above it, its form more fully lived and longer surviving; the Chrysler Building (8.1), the older emblem of the tower, stands two tenths above on ninety-six years of survival.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.0, The Living Form at 7.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Imperishable at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met, narrowly: The Living Form meets it exactly at 7.5, and no other axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the Epochal Gate alone is not. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, from a sum of 94.6, in the band of Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the building as it stands in 2026 and of its documented history. No plan, image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the headquarters building of China Central Television in Beijing, the single looped structure of base, two towers and overhang, with its plaza and podium, which houses the broadcaster’s administration, news, production, broadcasting and studios. The Television Cultural Center on the same site, by the same architects, gutted by fire on 9 February 2009 and later completed, and the Media Park planned with the two buildings, are context and are not scored; nothing of the scored building was lost or replaced, and it stands as built. The design is credited to OMA, with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren as partners in charge (Scheeren led the work in Beijing and left OMA in 2010), with Arup as structural and services engineers, Cecil Balmond among the early engineering partners, and the East China Architectural Design and Research Institute as local design institute; collaboration is not charged. The use scored is the one the building was made for, the broadcaster’s headquarters, together with the public visitor route through it that the design provided. No documented words are quoted; da kucha is the building’s popular name. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the storey count of the whole and of base and overhang, the angle of the lean, the gross floor area, the tonnage of steel, the year construction began and the stages of occupation, the reason for the timing of the join, the fit-out of the studios and offices, how the internal circulation is used, and whether the public route operates and how often.