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ARCHITECTURE 1107
THEBIO'O'
This picture, In BeiJing's
Central Business District.
the OMA-deslgned
CCTV HQ Is due to open
this year. To the right
stands the complex's
Television Cultural
Centre, damaged by fire
last year and currently
being repaired
Right. OMA partner
Ole Scheeren In his
Beijing office, from
where he oversees the
firm's Asian operations
SQUARNG
THE C RCLE
The rise ofOle Scheeren, Rem Koolhaas' playmaker in Asia,
is proving that Beijing is now architecture's main game
PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREW ROWAT WRITER: ARIC CHEN
Architect Ole Scheeren is sitting in his spacious
white office on the z9th floor of a high-rise
edging a thicket of high-rises in the Central
Business District of Beijing. It's a hot afternoon
in July, and outside his window, with its vast
panorama of the still-booming Chinese capital,
the global recession feels like some other
planet's problem. Below Scheeren is the Third
Ring Road, its traffic-clogged, dozen-plus lanes
lurching towards the gravity-defying behemoth
known as the CCTV tower.
With the possible exception of the Olympic
Bird's Nest stadium, no other building has
become as iconic of China's architectural
ambitions as the CCTV tower. Set to become the
HQof China Central Television, the country's
state television broadcaster, when it opens later
this year, it's not so much a tower as a spinetingling conceit: a z34m-tall pair of glass-andsteel angles that, flouting impossibility, touch
in mid-air. Designed by Scheeren and his boss,
the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, the building
has already secured its place as one of the
most significant buildings of the century.
It's the project that made Scheeren's name,
and the reason he moved to Beijing.
But today, Scheeren seems keen to distance
himself from it. 'After I did this,' he says,
grabbing a one-foot-tall model of the CCTV
building, 'I wanted to do something as different
as possible.' With practised flair, he puts the
model down. 'And so I did this,' he continues 'this' being a model of a project in Shanghai.
Made to the same scale as the CCTV mock-up,
it is ridiculously tiny - not much bigger than
his thumbnail.
For Scheeren, it seems, life is a series of
inverse efforts to swim against the currents
of convention and expectation. You know me
for designing gigantic buildings? I'll do a
miniscule one instead. The West is making
forays into China? I'll have China as my base,
and make forays into the West. Still a partner
of the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA), the trailblazing firm
co-founded by Koolhaas in 1975, Scheeren is
charged with overseeing the practice's Asian
projects and newly opened Hong Kong office»
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ARCHITECTURE 1109
TOP MODELS
This picture. in OMA's
Beijing office, models
of the Interlace
complex in Gillman
Heights, Singapore
Left. the shelves are
packed with various
models of the CCTV
tower and Singapore's
Scotts Tower
from his Beijing HQ And increasingly he is
calling the creative shots.
For starters, there is the Shanghai project,
scheduled to open this spring. When Crystal CG,
the Chinese digital animation giant, asked
Scheeren to wrap its cluster of five post-industrial
buildings with a new, unified fa~ade, Scheeren
realised that installing the cheapest curtain wall
would still cost double the project's budget.
'I told them, "What you gave me is completely
impossible,'" he says, adding: 'So I accepted the
challenge.' Scheeren's solution was to preserve
four of the buildings and demolish the fifth,
inserting a metal mesh-clad structure in its place.
Then there is his upcoming Scotts Tower
in Singapore, a 36-storey luxury residential
high-rise that defiantly thumbs its nose at
convention: it looks as if four glass towers are
sliding up and down its central core. Having now
done upscale residences, Scheeren wants to tackle
affordable housing, too. Also in Singapore, his
proposed Interlace development of 1,040 flats in
Gillman Heights is a seemingly irregular stack of
massive boxes, all carefully calibrated to optimise
daylight, airflow, cost and communal space.
Alongside a theorist's knack for inventing
words (say, 'complexification'), Scheeren has a
wonky fascination with analysis and research,
speaking frequently in flow-chart fashion while
summoning an intricate databank of percentages
and ratios. In true OMA style, his process is a
highly rationalised one that, churned through
the algorithms of a rebellious world view,
produces buildings of irrational daring. The aim
is nothing short of questioning everything we
think we know about buildings - how they are
organised, conceived, used and interpretedin order to achieve a new environment.
Perhaps the most striking example of this, and
Scheeren's biggest, post-CCTV project, will be the
MahaNakhon tower, now breaking ground in
Bangkok. At 77 storeys, it will be Thailand's
tallest building when finished, a soaring
skyscraper whose smooth glassy surface will be
broken by a spiralling gash that reveals a
three-dimensional, pixelated interior carved with
terraces. The design, which has been controversial
in Thailand, seems to be both generating and
eroding at once - a techno-geological illusion.
'Ole approaches his work so that each
project is different,' says Sorapoj Techakraisri,
the developer of the building, which will
include high-end boutiques and restaurants,
Ritz-carlton-managed apartments and an
Edition hotel, part of a new brand from Marriott
and New York hotelier Ian Schrager. 'His work is
completely original,' adds Schrager. 'He's doing
all of the hotel's public spaces, which won't be
like anything you'd expect. And I want him to
take it a step further and reinvent the rooms.'
While OMA projects such as the CCTV
complex and the forthcoming Taipei Performing
Arts Center are jointly credited to Koolhaas and
Scheeren, all of these latest commissions (which
are still under the OMA umbrella) bear Scheeren's
name alone. Although overwhelmingly associated
with Koolhaas, OMA has long presented itself
as a firm that gives younger partners a degree of
autonomy. 'Rem is someone who can inspire you,'
says Scheeren. 'But he also gives you space.'
Scheeren, now 39, was born in the city of
Karlsruhe, in south-west Germany. His father
was also an architect but, as Scheeren tells it,
In true OMA fashion,
Scheeren questions
everything we think we
know about buildings
it was at the age of 18 that he understood where
his future lay. That year, Koolhaas won a
competition to design Karlsruhe's Zentrum ftir
Kunst und Medientechnologie, a new media art
centre. The proposal was never built but, after
attending the Dutch master's lectures in the
city, Scheeren was won over. 'I thought, perhaps
rather naively, "This is the only person I'd ever
want to work with,'" he recalls.
After finishing high school, Scheeren, who
had begun working for his father at the age of 14,
bought a second-hand Lancia YlO and began
driving around Europe, absorbing as much
architecture as he could. 'I knew I had to gain a
better understanding,' he explains. Meanwhile,
he played in rock bands, built his first project,
a retail conversion, and continued his studies
in Karlsruhe and Lausanne. In 1995, Scheeren
moved to London to study at the Architectural
Association. But the night before classes were to
begin, he made a drastic decision: 'It's time,'
he recalls thinking. The next day, Scheeren
abruptly left London for Rotterdam. Showing up
at OMA, unannounced, he demanded to see
Koolhaas. His brazenness paid off.
Still, Scheeren remained restless. He spent
over a year at OMA, followed by stints in New
York, London (where he completed his studies at
the Architectural Association) and Bangkok. In
1999, Koolhaas called Scheeren back to Rotterdam
to work on the firm's flagship stores for Prada in
New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco (only
the first two were realised). Three years later,
the young architect was made partner, and OMA
won the commission to build CCTV.
Scheeren has what you might call the classic
architect's syndrome: a propensity for big, heroic
visions tempered by the more humbling realities
of realising them. More to the point, 'he is a
fast thinker and has an enormous curiosity that
goes far beyond the field of architecture', says»
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110 I ARCHITECTURE
SHELL SHOCK
The worst fire damage
at TVCC, resulting from
a blaze started by
fireworks, was limited to
the tower's outer layers
Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine
Gallery in London. In 1999, having worked with
Koolhaas and Scheeren on the installation of the
'Cities on the Move' exhibition at London's
Hayward Gallery, Obrist invited Scheeren to work
with him on the show's Bangkok edition.
Taking over shopping malls, train stations and
other unlikely locations, the exhibition fed, and
was fed by, the frenetic Thai capital, turning the
Asian hyper-city into something akin to a giant
happening. Even now, Scheeren is still animated
when talking about it. 'It was an incredible model
of complexity I felt compelled by,' he says. Adds
Obrist: 'When we went to Bangkok, I saw Ole's
immense curiosity about Asia, which anticipated
his move to Beijing years later. I could tell he had
this desire to move to the centre, to spend some
time not in the Western world, but to be there.'
Scheeren didn't relocate to Beijing until 2004,
when work on CCTV began in earnest. The move
was as much a personal project as a professional
one. 'I wanted to see how I conld change this
environment, but also how this environment
could change me,' he says. 'I also wanted to
declare Beijing a creative centre from where we
can think about other places, to think of Beijing
as the hub, rather than a spoke.'
It may turn out that Scheeren was prescient.
With the global economic slowdown accelerating
China's relative rise - the country is likely to
surpass Japan this year to become the world's
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second largest economy - it is clear the future
will be increasingly defined in the East. In the
context of such mega-projects as Zaha Hadid's
forthcoming Guangzhou Opera House and
Steven Holl's recently completed Vanke Center in
Shenzhen, the mad rush into China by many
Western architects has acquired greater urgency
as work dries up at home. Meanwhile, an
emerging generation of young Chinese architects
is building at a pace their foreign counterparts
can only dream of. As in other arenas, China's
unprecedented urbanisation, and the social and
environmental challenges it brings, is shifting
architecture's centre of gravity towards Beijing.
For his part, Scheeren has in some ways
become the ultimate insider in China. (Since
2007, he has been dating the actress Maggie
Cheung.) On the other hand, he is somewhat
off the radar, rarely mentioned in Chinese
architecture circles. Keeping in character, it's this
ambiguous state - of being part of something,
yet outside it - that Scheeren says suits him.
But in February last year, Scheeren was
unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight, and not
in the way he would have preferred. On the last
night of the Chinese New Year celebrations,
workers on the CCTV site launched unauthorised
fireworks. Sparks landed on the roof of the
Television Cultural Center (TVCe), a 38-storey
tower, designed as part of the whole complex,
that was to house a Mandarin Oriental hotel.
While the CCTV tower was left unscathed,
TVCC, still under construction, erupted in
flames, killing one firefighter.
Scheeren was in Johannesburg at the time,
but within hours he was on a flight back to
Beijing. There, rumours began swirling: the fire
was intentionally set because Mandarin Oriental,
upset by construction delays, was about to pull
out, making the insurance worth more than the
building itsel£ Then there was the 'CCTV is
Falling' theory: TVCC acted as a counterweight to
CCTV and had been so structurally damaged that
it had to be torn down, threatening to tip the
bigger building over. And on it went - though
none of it, of course, turned out to be true.
Though hesitant to speak publicly about the
fire, Scheeren allows that repair work has begun
on TVCC. Meanwhile, after a lengthy delay, a 2010
unveiling for CCTV is on track. What's more,
Scheeren appears especially pleased about the
impending opening of the Crystal CG project in
Shanghai, to include a non-profit digital culture
centre that Scheeren proposed. 'One of the key
struggles I see in China is that, while production
is booming, the establishment is lacking a critical
framework for what's happening,' he says.
To be sure, Scheeren sees himself as something
of a catalyst in China. But how has Beijing
changed him? After a long pause, he responds:
'It's taught me a lot in terms of understanding
architecture as an incredibly complex interplay
of multiple aspects. It's embodied in an extreme
way here that incorporates technical complexity,
political significance, historical symbolism and
cultural interplay.' I'm a bit confused by his
answer, until I realise he's talking about CCTV.
Indeed, for Scheeren, CCTV is Beijing.
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