CCTV is Connected

Alex Pasternack | Dec 10, 2007 11:05 am | Add a comment | 1557 reads

On Saturday morning, a friend sent me a text message that shook me more than it should have, though it was a bleary-eyed morning. "Get down there now! They've connected and no one knows how or when it happened..." Of course, we all knew what time it was going to happen – in the middle of the night, in under an hour, when the temperatures of the massive steel structures were coolest and most uniform. But there were some conflicting reports about when exactly the world's most improbable building would actually come together. When I arrived, even at dusk and under a shroud of netting, it was clear that the CCTV headquarters had been connected. For weeks the building's two towers had been edging closer, as if locked in some sort of glacial, surrealist architectural mating dance. The tension was killing us. Now the tension is keeping the towers locked together. What makes the "twisted donut" (is there not a better nickname?) different now, as a fellow CCTV (building) enthusiast noted, was that the hole, not the building, has become visible. Is there any other building in the world so defined by its negative space?

Still, I prefer the under-construction, Death Star-look of Beijing's two leaning towers, that moment of suspense before the final rendezvous, the slight sense of indifference of both towers, as if they could easily pass each other by on the way up (or the way down). The complete connection, we hear, is scheduled for February. And a proper ceremony to celebrate the tying of the knot is scheduled for just after Christmas (the building will open in 2009). Now that the towers have consummated their loopy relationship, how long will it be until they start spawning baby CCTVs all over the city?

For more background on the project, take a look at this clip from a Discovery Channel documentary about Olympic-related construction in Beijing: