The CCTV Headquarters—Horizontal Skyscraper or Vertical Courtyard? Anomalies of Beijing Architecture, Urbanism, and Globalisation

Beijing’s China Central Television Headquarters was designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas. Completed in 2012, it is a controversial feature of the Beijing skyline: an anomaly in a double sense. Firstly and most obviously, it stands out as an anomalous, futuristic reimagining of the vertical skyscraper typology. Koolhaas calls it a “hyperbuilding”—a self-contained, aerial “city” meant to ease urban overcrowding. The building’s second anomaly is less conspicuous than the first, but ultimately, perhaps, more socially significant. The classical Chinese courtyard house, or siheyuan, is ubiquitous in Beijing. While less common today than in the past, its influence, in modified form, remains evident in local and diasporic Chinese architecture. Framed within the CCTV Headquarters’ dominant horizontalism, the siheyuan—in the shape of a vertical courtyard—is an anomaly within an anomaly. Daniel M. Abramson’s concept of “unbuilt architecture” opens architecture more fully to its historical context, which helps position the CCTV Headquarters in relationship to Roberto Schwarz’ argument that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships.” Born of ancient Chinese philosophy, the form of the siheyuan has massive social consequence, which overlaps with the CCTV Headquarters as a site of globalized data. The courtyard of data thus produced creates a heterotopic tension of “glocalization”, which interrupts the hegemony of hybrid “globalization” that Koolhaas asserts of the building. As an architectural anomaly, the siheyuan points the way towards a new sort of architecture—one better sensitized to “glocal” tensions, in which the local and the global might be more productively reconciled.