Inferno destroys Beijing tower

A massive fire engulfs a tower in the soon-to-be completed headquarters complex of China's national TV broadcaster. WSJ's International News Editor Rebecca Blumenstein provides more details and speaks with colleague Adam Najberg about China's fire safety amid a rapidly growing city.



A fireman is reported dead and six others injured after a huge fire consumed part of China Central Television's new building complex in Beijing on the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday. An initial investigation showed that the fire had been caused by illegal firecracker launches. Video courtesy of Reuters

The world's largest building

National Grand Theater, Beijing

Located near Tiananmen Square, the 490,485-square-foot glass-and-titanium National Grand Theater, scheduled to open in 2008, seems to float above a man-made lake. Intended to stand out amid the Chinese capital's bustling streets and ancient buildings, the structure has garnered criticism among Bejing's citizens for clashing with classic landmarks like the Monument to the People's Heroes (dedicated to revolutionary martyrs), the vast home of the National People's Congress, or Tiananmen Gate itself (the Gate of Heavenly Peace).

French architect Paul Andreu is no stranger to controversy -- or to innovative forms. A generation ago, in 1974, his untraditional design for Terminal 1 of Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport was criticized for its unusual curves, yet Andreu's groundbreaking, futuristic building later was seen to distinguish de Gaulle from more generic European and international air hubs. (The same airport's Terminal 2E, also designed by Andreu, gained attention in 2004 when it collapsed, tragically killing four people.)

Beijing's daring National Grand Theater is as much a spectacle as the productions that will be staged inside in the 2,416-seat opera house, the 2,017-seat concert hall, and the 1,040-seat theater. At night, the semi-transparent skin will give passersby a glimpse at the performance inside one of three auditoriums, a feature that highlights the building's public nature.

Beijing's strange Olympic Stadium

Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron collaborated with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to design the Beijing Olympic Stadium, the National Stadium.

The innovative Beijing Olympic Stadium, the National Stadium, is often called the Bird's Nest. Composed of a complex mesh of steel bands, the Beijing Olympic Stadium incorporates elements of Chinese art and culture.

Adjacent to the Beijing Olympic Stadium is another innovative new structure, the National Aquatic Centre, also known as the Water Cube.

Builders and Designers for the Beijing Olympic Stadium:

• Herzog & de Meuron, architects
• Ai Weiwei, Artistic Consultant
• China Architecture Design & Research Group

Beijing National Stadium Statistics:

• 36 km of unwrapped steel
• 330 metres (1,082 feet) long
• 220 metres (721 feet) wide
• 69.2 metres (227 feet) tall
• 258,000 square metres (2,777,112 square feet) of space
• Usable area of 204,000 square metres (2,195,856 square feet)
• Seating for up to 91,000 spectators during the Olympics. (Seating reduced to 80,000 after the Games.)
• Construction cost approximately 3.5 billion yuan ($423 million USD)

(via About.com)

Beijing's new airport takes off

Beijing has opened a huge new £1.8 billion airport terminal today ahead of this summer's Olympics.

The terminal's two mile long concourse, which is divided into three sections and connected by a shuttle train, will boost capacity at the airport to 76 million compared with the 52 million who used the airport last year.

The new airport terminal is supposed to resemble a dragon, complete with triangular windows cut into the ceiling as though they were scales. It was designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster, who also designed Hong Kong's Chep Lap Kok airport.

It has almost double the number of boarding gates of the old terminals and nearly 300 check-in desks. The terminal has been built to maximise the use of natural light, with walls of glass.

Air travel in China is booming, on the back of growing tourism and rising domestic incomes, with 200 million passengers expected to take to this skies this year, up from 185 million last year.
The country plans to build nearly 100 new airports by 2020 to cater for this demand, many in remote, economically backward areas.

Six airlines will use the new terminal initially, including British Airways, Sichuan Airlines, Shandong Airlines, Qatar Airways, Qantas and El Al Israel Airlines.

More will move in from March 26, including Air China, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada and other Star Alliance members, as well as Emirates and Hong Kong's Dragonair.

The terminal also has special bridges to handle Airbus's giant double-decked A380 superjumbo.

(via Flightmapping)

China puts twist on traditional skyscraper

As Beijing races to radically redesign its skyline for the summer Olympics, one of the most striking new structures is the headquarters for China's national TV broadcaster. It's billed as the second-largest office building on Earth -- second only to the Pentagon.

Last month, China Central Television (CCTV), the venerable voice of the communist government, celebrated the formal joining -- or "shaking hands" -- of the two leaning legs of the building. Those structures have defied gravity for the past three years of construction, and critics for far longer.

At 54 stories tall, the more than $600 million headquarters is far from setting a record for height. The Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan holds that title with 101 stories until the Burj Dubai skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates is completed with more than 160 stories and snatches it next year.

"You can only lose that race," says Ole Scheeren, the German architect-in-charge of the new CCTV headquarters. Instead, Scheeren, a partner with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, says they reinvented the traditional skyscraper by turning it into "a tube folded in space."

The structure "breaks every single building code in China," a beaming Scheeren says, but still won the official go-ahead for construction. "The approval authorities were not able to judge if it could function, so the government formed an expert group of the 13 most senior structural engineers -- the people who wrote the codes!"

The green light came in 2004, one of several high-profile victories for the Western architects who have turned China's capital into a playground of experimentation.

Scheeren says the CCTV headquarters, when complete, will be "the second-biggest office building in the world ... (in) usable floor area."

Despite repeated protests by local architects, huge, asymmetrical designs of glass and steel by Koolhaas' Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and others have been plopped amid Beijing's Stalinist government buildings and the golden-tiled imperial city.

City makeover

Winning the Olympics has spurred Beijing into spending $40 billion on stadiums and improvements to the airport and subway, more than double what Greece spent on the Athens Olympics in 2004. The massive makeover magnifies one of Beijing's headaches -- dust from hundreds of construction sites adds to the chronic air pollution.

In 2007, Beijing's new look included the opening of the space-age "Eggshell," the French-designed National Theater just off Tiananmen Square.

Olympic projects nearing completion include the "Bird's Nest" and "Water Cube," nicknames for the Swiss-designed main stadium and the Australian-designed swimming center.

Visitors will fly into the swooping new terminal at Beijing Capital Airport designed by British architect Norman Foster.

The CCTV building is the one that will "blow the minds" of American visitors to the Olympics, says site project manager David Howell of San Francisco.

The 10,000 people who will work there won't move in until Oct.1, 2009, to coincide with the 60th birthday of the People's Republic of China.

"There are many new projects coming on line in Beijing, and each has an exciting concept, but this one has more power," says Howell of the U.S. firm Turner International. "It has generated a lot of conversation, which is good for architecture."

CCTV's costly new home kicked up protests from several Chinese architects and divided opinions among ordinary Beijingers.

The design "is a fundamental mistake. It's too strange, does not suit Chinese perceptions of beauty and makes people uncomfortable because it is not straight," says leading critic Xiao Mo, an architectural historian.

Xiao says foreign architects don't understand China's complex culture, while native architects lack sufficient confidence in their own culture. The result is free-form projects such as the CCTV building and the "Eggshell" -- two "strange and shocking designs" that are "stains on Chinese history," Xiao says.

Howell acknowledges the negative local reaction. "Over time, things soften. It will be embraced by the Chinese," he predicts.

Vertiginous views

On the bridge where the two leaning legs of the office building meet, an additional 11 stories will go up, with nothing but the Beijing smog below. People with vertigo should avoid the glass floor Scheeren plans for the viewing deck 525 feet above the city's bustling Central Business District.

"I wanted views both horizontally and vertically," Scheeren says. "Being 30 meters (99 feet) up feels more frightening, but at this height, it's so abstract that I find it calming," he says.

Laborer Tian Yanping, one of numerous workers in China's building boom, says the height doesn't bother him. On the structure's overhang, Tian, a migrant worker from Henan province, says he is "very proud" to have risen with the project, floor by floor. He says the salary of $275 per month, typical for migrant laborers, is "OK" for the risks of working on the skyscraper.

China's construction industry is a major contributor to the more than 100,000 deaths in the country last year from workplace accidents, according to the State Administration of Work Safety. There have been no casualties to date at the CCTV building, Scheeren says.

Scheeren hopes the "new symbolism" of his building will inspire change in a society obsessed with symbols.

The design will have CCTV employees working together in a "loop of interconnected activities," while the senior management's offices will be "somewhere in the middle," not at the top, as "we are deconstructing the classical hierarchical system," Scheeren says.

"I couldn't imagine it going up anywhere else," the architect says. China is a "combination of willpower, enthusiasm and courage that could not converge similarly anywhere else in the world."

(via Building Design and Construction)

How a traditional Chinese painting looks 3-D and animated

Amazing stuff!



via Virtual China