The CCTV Headquarters is a skyscraper in the Beijing Central Business District. The building is the headquarters of China Central Television. Groundbreaking took place on September 22, 2004 and the building’s facade was completed in Jun 2008. Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA were the architects in charge for the building, while Arup provided the complex engineering design. It stands at 234 meters (768 ft) tall and has 54 floors.
The main building is not a traditional tower, but a loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 473,000 square meters (about 5 million square feet) 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. Because of its radical shape, it’s said the taxi driver first came up its nickname dà kùchǎ (大裤衩), meaning "Big Boxers".
The building was built in two buildings that were joined to became one building December 26, 2007. In order not to lock in structural differentials this connection was planned to be completed in the early moring 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.
An adjacent building in the complex, the Television Cultural Center, caught on fire, ignited by fireworks on Lantern Festival day, February 9, 2009, before the building’s scheduled completion in May 2009. It was to have the Beijing Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a visitor’s center, a large public theatre, 2 recording studios with 3 audio control rooms, a digital cinema and 2 screening rooms. The 520 ft. Mandarin Oriental Hotel was destroyed and one fire fighter was killed. The over $1 billion fire damage to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel is so severe that occupants have been unable to move into the CCTV building next door due to safety concerns to the general structure.In October 25 2009, scaffolds was set up in the front gate of TVCC which indicated the renovation of the building has began.
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 December 20, 2002. 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.
Other Information
- Location : Beijing, People’s Republic of China
- Status : Television station
- Constructed : 2004 – 2009
- Opening : Estimate mid 2010
- Height Antenna/Spire : 234m
- Floor count : 54
- Elevator count : 75
- Architects : Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren
- Engineering design: Arup