Throwback Thursday: The Day Beijing's Big Pants Unsplit
Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.
Ahh, the Big Pants. Love it or hate it (Xi certainly hates it), the CCTV Headquarters on Guanghua Lu is one of the most striking buildings in Beijing's architectural canon, standing like an oversized mousetrap or singular fang ready to rip apart the city's Central Business District.
It was this month, nine years ago, that one of the most technically challenging phases of the construction was completed: the ceremonial joining of the two "legs" and creation of CCTV's proverbial crotch.
For those of you that don't know, it was apparently a droll Beijing taxi driver (as they are so often known to be) who originally came up with the name 大裤衩 dà kùchǎ i.e. big grudders as we'd say in the UK, which then morphed into the Big Pants.
Completion of the facade of the building would only take a further two months but overall completion was delayed until May 2012 because of a fire that broke out during Lantern Festival 2009 in the adjacent Television Culture Center, thought to have been caused by a wayward firework.
The lines that decorate the outside of the building designate the division of pressure on the materials, with the underside "crotch" region and at the bottom of the legs taking the majority of the weight, as shown from the higher density of lines.
After completion, and in an apparent effort to piss everyone off equally, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas said of his design that it "could never have been conceived by the Chinese and could never have been built by Europeans. It is a hybrid by definition."
As cool and futuristic as that sounds, one word to whoever is in charge of hosing the thing down, it doesn't make it exempt from needing a nice, long bath.
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Below is former Beijinger writer's Alex Pasternack's description of the big event back in December 2007 (before it even had the Big Pants moniker):
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?
Photos: Meng Luyue, Dutchtom (Flickr)
