The new CCTV headquarters in Beijing is an amazing piece of architecture which bestrides its site like a Colossus. Not all views are the same. Architecture scholar Xiao Mo in an article posted on the internet says that the building’s Dutch architect Rem Koolhas is making a sexual statement.
He takes two collages which are, in fact, six years old, and makes them into dirty pictures. He writes, "The 3D animated model we see of the CCTV headquarters is actually a giant backside getting larger as you zoom in."
In the pictures, which originally appeared in an article in a magazine/book called Content, apparently with at least the consent of the architect, the main building of the CCTV complex is in the background. A naked woman, kneeling in a pose to resemble the architecture, occupies the foreground in one of them, while another woman, in a bikini and holding a gun, stares at you from the other.
Despite the collages being now somewhat past their use-by date, the pictures now being shown by Xiao’s posting has many netizens join him in terming the building a "disgrace".
Ai Weiwei, leading architectural designer and curator who has a copy of Content on his bookshelf, said it was a ridiculous joke, created by people who do not understand architecture and a section of the media that has not bothered to find out the truth.
One wonders what architecture scholar Xiao Mo would have made of the Eiffel Tower when it was built? Several citizens left Paris to live elsewhere, because they thought it was a disgusting phallic structure. Which, in fairness, it is.
China Daily said the CCTV headquarters cost more than RMB5 billion ($735 million) to build.