Hovering over air in Beijing

Living in China is like being in a laboratory and observing an experiment unfold.

The speed of change in the physical surroundings, especially in cities like Beijing, has no parallel anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell. A modern gold rush is afoot here, and prospectors are arriving from around the globe. Some of them are charlatans, and there’s mud everywhere, but what is emerging can be a thing of beauty.

There is an international feel to the change. The Chinese have money, and they are throwing it in a lot of directions. Some of it is landing in the laps of the world’s most daring and famous architects. And they are audacious in their designs.

Sometimes it is downright dramatic.

Take, for example, the new CCTV tower(s), which I have written about before. Workers toiling for months now have built two leaning towers that thrust into the air at drunken angles. At any moment now, and trust me, I look every day, the workers will link the two towers with a multistory elbow 40 floors above ground.

The end result will be a crooked Z-shaped building, a loopy angular twin-tower structure with a cantilevered cross-section that hovers over absolutely nothing, thin air. The ground will be 525 feet below. I dare say those afraid of heights may not want to walk the glass-bottomed cross-section once it is complete.

The joining of the two towers has to happen quickly, I’m told, because pressures of wind, temperature and minor earth movements could torque and damage the buildings. So it’ll happen before dawn, maybe this weekend.

Rory McGowan, a social friend of ours, is one of the chief engineers on the project for Arup, the huge British firm. A while back, I heard him say that perhaps no construction project on Earth has had the kind of computer modeling done to it as the CCTV tower. As perilous and tipsy as the structure may appear, it has survived every possible stress put on it and comes out firm.

Barely a decade ago, computers were not really powerful enough to test such designs for stability and stress-resistance.

The new tower, designed by the firm of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will house the headquarters of China’s state broadcaster, and should be in use by the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. I have no doubt that visitors will see it and remark how they’ve never seen anything like it before. Some already dub the structure the “twisted doughnut.” Read more articles here and here.

The finished building will be that largest single structure in the world after the Pentagon in Washington.

Comments

[A B]

Whenever I hear of engineers brag about how something is 'not possible' to do without high tech software simulations, I start worrying about bugs and errors in the simulation programs that have embedded some hidden flaw in the product.

Remember the Sleipner A offshore oil platform when a bug in a commonly used finite element analysis software resulted in a structure that was too weak to take the anticipated loads?

Or the Ariane explosion?

I hope some human engineer with a lot of experience carefully hand checked the calculations before they started building.

If not, they could end up with their own version of the Kim Jong Il tower.

[Pffefer]

AB, where is Kim Jong-il tower? You mean the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel? If you meant Juche tower, it is safe and sound.

Come on, that can't be Beijing. Blue sky in Beijing? Wow.

[Tyler]

When I was in Beijing last summer, I heard from friends and cabbies that the CCTV tower's most popular nickname is 裤子，or the trousers.

[A B]

Will the trousers tower be male or female?

Imagine a future addition to the building.... will it have big hips or... be well endowed?

Kim Jong Il tower refers to the Ryugyoung Hotel.

[Mike]

Just went past it today and it still doesn't quite look like the towers have been joined.

[zhuowen]

Nice building,that CCTV tower. Hope it won't crash, but it looks sturdy enough tough.