CCTV Headquarters, Beijing

Seen from Beijing's East Third Ring Road, the headquarters of China Central Television refuses to behave like a skyscraper. Instead of a single shaft rising to a point, two leaning towers climb out of a shared base and are joined at the top by an overhanging bridge that turns sharply in mid-air, so the whole building forms a closed, three-dimensional loop around an empty centre. The angled upper section reaches out 75 metres into space with nothing below it. Its surface is wrapped in an irregular grid of steel bracing that grows denser where the forces are greatest, making the structure's own stresses visible on the façade. Beijingers quickly gave it a nickname — dà kùchǎ, "big shorts" — said to have been coined by a taxi driver.

The design came from Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, who won an international competition — with a jury that included Arata Isozaki and Charles Jencks — and signed the contract on 1 January 2002. Cecil Balmond of Arup led the engineering, a formidable task in an earthquake zone. Construction began on 1 June 2004. The two towers were built separately and joined into one structure on 30 May 2007; the final connection was made in the early morning, when the steel of both towers had cooled to the same temperature, so that no thermal stresses were locked in. The façade was completed in January 2008, and the building was finished in 2012. It rises 51 storeys to 234 metres, with three more levels underground, and houses CCTV's administration, newsrooms, broadcasting and programme production in a single continuous loop of studios and offices.

Koolhaas described the loop as an expression of collectivity, communication and continuity, and argued that the building was a hybrid that neither China nor Europe could have produced alone. Critics went further, some calling it perhaps the greatest work of architecture of the century, and in 2013 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named it the best tall building in the world. It stands in Beijing's Central Business District in Chaoyang, the modern counterpart to the imperial city a few kilometres to the west, where the capital of the Ming and Qing dynasties still centres on the Forbidden City.

Getting there

The building stands on Guanghua Road by the East Third Ring Road in the Central Business District of Beijing, about 5 km east of the city centre. Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) is about 22 km away in a straight line.