Concerto, Beijing

Film

Located in Beijing’s bustling Chaoyang district, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)’s CCTV Headquarters (2012) is a bold exploration into the contemporary sculptural expressionist role of urban scale architecture. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, the intense architectural pragmatism of the tower (plagued by an impossible 8 years of construction) is matched only by the urban freneticism of the environment in which it sits. Beijing, a city itself dealing with the reconciliation of some 4000 years of history with contemporary approaches for the future under a rapidly expanding population, has experience a staggering 85% destruction and reconstruction of existing built form since 1995. Concerto, Beijing meditates on this urban challenge, the completed work’s structural impossibility and looming presence over the city testament to China’s collective might.