Modernity and Contradiction -CCTV building-

Nowdays its very important for cities to have modern and amazing builidings to reflect their power and future. But what happens when that means to destroy the past?. Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas tells Jonathan Glancey why even he gets nostalgic.

Koolhaas is one of the most famous architechts in the world, he was born in Rotterdam (1944). He lived four years of his childhood in Indonesia and in 1956 returned to Holand, to his home city. Rotterdam was in reconstruction because it was destroyed by the germans, probably many people in that time could think about being an architect. Firstly Koolhaas was a journalist but he left that career and started to study architecture. Koolhaas is responsible of some of the most challenging, controversial and critically acclaimed buildings of the past decade like Seattle public library, Casa da Musica and many more.
Koolhaas its actually working in a very ambitious project on the new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV). due in time for the Olympics next August
The tower its ambitious: 230 metres high, designed in the shape of a 3D Chinese character, its steel structure forms a continuous spatial loop climbing up and around the volume of the building.

This architect has to face with being the constructor of a new image but at the same time to be part of the destruction of the old kind of life at the "hutongs", these are tight webs of hotchpotch homes and alleys gathered around wells from the age-old courtyards of Beijing. The olimpics will find the hutongs old fashioned and unnecesary, most of them will be gone. Those who live there are being given new high-rise flats.

Koolhaas shows to the reporter some old photos of the streets at hutongs and he looks at them with affection... He`s a complex and intriguing architect, a man who thrives on free thinking and seems that his heart belongs to a world closer to Beijing's hutongs and old cities but the next day he can be design the architecture demanded by ultra-capitalism or absolutist governments.


taken from

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2156966,00.html