The CCTV Headquarters is a 234 m (768 ft), 44-story skyscraper on East Third Ring Road, Guanghua Road in the Beijing Central Business District (CBD). The tower serves as headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) that was formerly at the China Central Television Building located at 11 Fuxin Road some 15 km (9.3 mi) to the west. Groundbreaking took place on 1 June 2004 and the building's facade was completed in January 2008. After the construction having been delayed as result of a fire which in February 2009 engulfed the adjacent Television Cultural Center, the Headquarters has been finally completed in May 2012.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA were the architects in charge for the building, while Arup provided the complex engineering design.
Background
The main building is not a traditional tower, but a loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 473,000 m (1,552,000 ft) 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 that a taxi driver first came up with its nickname dà kùchǎ (大裤衩), roughly translated as, "big boxer shorts".
The building was built in three buildings that were joined to become one and a half buildings 30 May 2007. In order not to lock in structural differentials this connection was scheduled in the early morning 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.
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 1 January 2002, after winning an international design competition. The jury included architect Arata Isozaki and critic Charles Jencks. 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.
CCTV Headquarters was officially opened by the Chairman on 1 January 2008. Among the distinguished guests at the opening were Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, Wen Jiabao and Guo Jinlong.
