7 years of hard work and efforts, the multi-million dollar modernist architecture unveiled for 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is now an eyesore. The blaze renderes the 31 story structure unuseable, as the titamium alloy and zinc of the outer structure was burnt!

With 159m height, the building designed by 2 reknown Architect, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, house a 1500-seat theater, a large ballroom, digital cinemas, recording studios, exhibition facilities, and a 5-star hotel operated by Mandarin Oriental. Koolhaas and Scheeren won the contract in December 2002. Since then, they were plagued by the usual quarrel about the design and spending. The construction started in 2004 and was expected to be completed in May 2009. It’s original proposal was to open to public for events/entertainment and can be used for filming.

The building was clad in Titanium Zinc alloy, which was introduced to China in 1999, a material that would allow the building to rust with dignity and to endure the passage of time better than other conventional metal Zinc. It’s ideal for high quality architectural cladding of roofs and facades. There’s some debates in Youtube and Twitter about why this building did not collapse.

Image by OMA Architect

From Time Magazine, May 2004:

“Detractors cite the $730 million CCTV project as the ultimate example of the Chinese regime’s tendency to plunder state coffers to glorify its own iron authority and say Koolhaas is an opportunist taking advantage of the country’s unique combination of state power and state capital to realize his own artistic ambitions. Ian Buruma, a writer who is a friend of Koolhaas, wondered aloud in the Guardian, a British newspaper, how the world would have reacted if an architect of Koolhaas’ stature had in the 1970s designed a TV station for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

But Koolhaas, 59, who was one of the first Western architects to study and write about China’s urban explosion, revels in such intellectual tussles. CCTV, he insists, like the mainland itself, ‘is in mutation’ and the building represents an effort to complement the state-owned company’s desire to keep pace with the times. CCTV’s current headquarters is completely closed to the public. Koolhaas’ design, in contrast, includes a public ‘media park’ in and around the base of the building intended to foster more interaction between commissars and the masses. ‘We are engaged,’ he says, ‘with an effort to support within [China's] current situation the forces that we think are progressive and well-intentioned… We’ve given them a building that will allow them to mutate.’”

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