The Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture is building one of the most extraordinary projects of our times, the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing, China. Scheduled for completion in time for the 2008 Olympics, it will be one of the largest buildings in the world and an astounding engineering feat that appears to defy gravity.

The central building, called by some disbelievers 'the twisted donut', consists of two colossal towers that rise from a nine-story L-shaped base and lean towards each other at a six-degree angle. More than 100 metres up in the air, each tower cantilevers horizontally to form a giant overhang, the two ends of which meet at an L-shaped angle in mid-air.

The chief designers are the world-renowned Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA and winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2000, and senior OMA partner, young German-born architect Ole Scheeren. "The concept of the building was a loop, a means to organize the program internally but also to define the shape externally", says Scheeren. "We saw it as a tube folded in space."

Almost irrational
The building's silhouette, with its emphasis less on tallness than on bigness, can also be seen as a comment on the skyscraper at this point in its post-9/11 history. The exterior of the building is covered with an erratic web of diagonal steel supports. This 'diagrid' is a computer and engineering-generated design that concentrates the supports at the points of greatest stress. Ole Scheeren points out:
"The irregular net looks almost irrational, but it is in fact the true expression of the forces inside the building."

The CCTV tower will be the world media hub of the 2008 Olympics and will house all departments and production facilities of China Central Television, destined to become one of the world's largest media organisations in the coming years. The tower, situated in a huge green public space occupying several city blocks, is linked to a sister building, the TVCC, a television cultural centre housing a five-star hotel and a hybrid performance space combining the functions of theatre and television studio.

Chinese Manhattan
CCTV is the centrepiece of a Chinese Manhattan of some 300 skyscrapers, called the Central Business District, rising to the east of Beijing's ancient Forbidden City. It is part of a tremendous building boom taking place throughout China. Star architects from the West are getting dream commissions: Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron, for example, is building the Olympic Stadium, and Paul Andreu from France is building the new National Theatre.

Chinese ManhattanOMA's interest in China dates back to the mid-1990s when Rem Koolhaas and his students at Harvard University studied emerging conditions in the Pearl River Delta. In fact, China, became such a burning interest for the firm that when it had to choose between taking part in the competition for Ground Zero in New York and the CCTV project in Beijing, it opted for China.

Ole Scheeren says the Ground Zero project involved "a situation that seemed hard to see as productive beginnings for a mechanism of change", whereas the construction of the CCTV buildings is directly linked to China's massive social transformation, begun with Deng Xiao Ping's market reforms in the 1980s and culminating in the Olympics.

Inconceivable scale
Most people agree that the CCTV tower could not be built in the West at this point in time - certainly not in the Netherlands, with its lack of space and its consensus bureaucracy.  Tina di Carlo, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, suggests the project could not even be built in America:
"The amount of manpower and labour it takes to construct this at this speed and of this size couldn't be accomplished in the US. When they poured the foundation, it was a 24-hour schedule; they had over 7000 trucks for a continual pour. That scale of construction is inconceivable in the US."

In spite of its uniqueness to China, some critics say the current building boom involving leading architects from the West is marginalising Chinese architects, and that too much change is coming to China's cities too fast. Ole Scheeren (photo) is quick to point out that OMA opened an office in Beijing and already involved Chinese architects during the CCTV competition. "We insisted the Chinese partners would be on board from the first day", he says. OMA had 13 Chinese architects come to Rotterdam to work on the project and 15 OMA architects were brought to Beijing: "It was this interest in making the project a real dialogue between the two cultures that has carried through to this day."

Cost and criticism
The public in China has voiced criticism of the cost of the construction in a country that still has many poor, and the danger of building such a daring design in an unstable seismic area like Beijing.

As for the cost, CCTV plans to expand to over 200 channels in the coming years, reaching the world's single largest television audience and the biggest plum in the cake shared by global advertisers. CCTV already pays more in taxes than it receives in state subsidies, and it is estimated that future advertising revenue could pay for the building in one year.

A more sustainable China?
More serious criticism is aimed at the social and environmental context of the project.  "The issue of sustainability is growing", says Quebec university professor Anne-Marie Broudehoux, author of The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. At a recent discussion in Amsterdam hosted by the International Institute of Asian Studies, she confronted Rem Koolhaas with her arguments:
"It is possible to build dream projects in China, because the cost of construction is so low. Why? Because of the labour conditions, people being paid five to seven dollars a day, 12 billion dollars are owed in back pay to migrant workers. Can't the superstars like Rem Koolhaas use their power to make a more sustainable China?"

The current exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "OMA in Beijing: China Central Television Headquarters by Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas" runs until 26 February 2007 (see links below).
Rem Koolhaas insists that it is crucial to participate, even irresponsible not to, because what happens in China affects all of humanity. However, he asks:  "But do you participate in a harmless way or in ways that make a difference? [...] We didn't go to China innocently but we incorporated criticism in the building of the regime itself."

Propaganda machine
Koolhaas has been accused of sympathising with authoritarianism and for placing architecture at the service of the megalomaniac propaganda machine of a repressive state apparatus. But China is also taking risks. At OMA's initiative, the CCTV building will have a parallel internal loop that will allow the public to have at least visual access to the makers of their television programmes.

By embracing the mass media and giving television an architectural showcase that has no equal elsewhere in the world, China's rulers are going down an unpredictable path towards developments it cannot control. These developments will change China even more than China is changing the world.

Click to listen to this edition of Dutch Horizons (Windows Media Audio)

The seemingly precarious joining in mid-air of the CCTV tower's giant cantilevers is perhaps an appropriate image for the age, reflecting the delicate balancing act that the Chinese authorities and the public will be playing in the coming years.