Finest Hour of CCTV

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has announced the winner of its Best Tall Building Worldwide: CCTV Headquarters (China Central Television Headquarters), Beijing, China, designed by OMA. As part of a nearly yearlong juried selection process across more than 60 entries, the Awards Jury first selected a Best Tall Building in four regions: the Americas, Middle East and Africa, Europe and Asia & Australasia. Senior representatives of each of these four winners then gave a presentation at the CTBUH Awards Symposium Nov. 7 at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, with the Jury convening immediately afterwards to determine the overall winner. The winner was announced by Wiel Arets, Dean of the School of Architecture at IIT, at the Awards Dinner following the Symposium.

Rem Koolhaas, Founding Partner, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, delivered the winning presentation, entitled “A New Typology for the Skyscraper: CCTV Headquarters, Beijing.” “When I published my last book, Content, in 2003, one chapter was called ‘Kill the Skyscraper,’” said Koolhaas, who received the award for CCTV. “Basically it was an expression of disappointment at the way the skyscraper typology was used and applied. I didn’t think there was a lot of creative life left in skyscrapers. Therefore, I tried to launch a campaign against the skyscraper in its more uninspired form.

“The fact that I am standing on this stage now, in this position, meant that my declaration of war went completely unnoted, and that my campaign was completely unsuccessful,” Koolhaas joked, concluding, “Being here, it is quite moving – to be part of a community that is trying to make skyscrapers more interesting. I am deeply grateful, and thank all my partners.” “I thought deciding the overall winner would be pretty straightforward, and it was not at all,” said CTBUH Executive Director Antony Wood, a 2013 awards juror. “It went through four rounds of voting before we decided on the winner.” The audience vote, taken separately, submitted via text message, and kept from the jury’s view until after their verdict had been announced, was the same – CCTV was the winner of the popular vote, too.

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Materials provided by CTBUH