Wallpaper - Beijing

Here at Wallpaper towers, we've gotten tired of the Spa at Badem Wurttemberg and just a little weary of those lush cherry tomatoes from Riverford Organic Vegetables so we thought we'd pay a flying visit to the new seat in the house called Beijing. To be sure we were surprised at the breath taking giantness of it all in an endlessly rolling suburban setting and a square that holds a million but what really caught our eye was...

... OK you can see I think the Wallpaper talk sounds like air kisses on cocaine. They got away with it for a while and Tyler Brûlé has moved on but still manages to do big time carbon footprint for the F.T. and Monocle which is like The Economist with Miu Miu shoe straps.But I wanted to talk about a different wallpaper that has really knocked me sideways. The following pictures are some structures which were knocked up in a matter of weeks and in one memorable instance tore a road up and made a new one, just for the construction; pretty much over night. But the point I want to make is that someone has decided they can't be completed in time for the Olympics and so they've come up with the ingenious idea of just wallpapering a skin to the outside so it looks like its ready to ROCK.

I call it velocity construction and you gotta see it to believe it.Chutzpah eh!

China Central Television Building (CCTV)

I took a taxi ride out to the new CCTV building over the Christmas break. They have recently connected the two main pillars in a feat of engineering that can only be truly appreciated by standing under it, walking around it and hopefully the next time I go by sneaking into it.

Architecture for me is a love affair and I've been folllowing the Dutch mastermind for the CCTV building in Beijing for a while now. His name is Rem Koolhaas and this latest project is truly the only building since the the Guggenheim in Bilbao, which I've felt has challenged and then extended my appreciation and meaning of the building form. I was close to trembling while standing under that huge overhang - but maybe that was the hangover too. Its all steel and feels like a Airbus A340 is suspended over your head. Here are the pictures from my N95 mobile phone camera that really don't do it justice.

It appears to defy general gravitational and architectural balance guidelines. I'd really like to hear what Owen Hatherley of Nasty Brutalist and Short thinks of this design. I feel that this qualifies in some respects as as good example of brutalist with other design nods and dimensions that I'd love to hear Owen's erudite (and quality socialist I might add) views.

The shot below is really pushing the zoom feature on the N95 to the max. The slightest movement shows up on the final shot but I think it starts to give a feel for all the safety netting suspended underneath the overhang as it was conjoined recently.

I couldn't help but look at all the lovely media space waiting to be made beautiful. Or at least let Beijing use it as a graffiti space. Its huge and rusting at the moment.

It needs to be walked around to appreciate all its angles.


If you look really hard. You can see the construction workers walking on a little horizontal section at the point where the sky meets the upper part of the joining section. Or put another way the other side of where the sun's glare is.


Just seeing this building means I have no choice now but to buy a decent camera. Any suggestions very much welcome. You might be able to see what I'm trying to capture. Expect more Beijing architecture. There are some amazing pieces around the city for the Olympics.