The new headquarters of China Central Television, known as CCTV in China, will surely become one of the greatest and most imaginative architectural achievements at the beginning of the 21st century. It was designed by OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and Arup. The team subsequently allied with the East China Design Institute (ECADI) to act as the essential local design institute for both architecture and engineering. The total space of it is 473 000m2 which combines administration and offices, news and broadcasting, programmed production, and services – the entire process of Chinese television – in a single loop of interconnected. This 234-meter-high mammoth uses more than 125,000 tons steel, which is three times more than the Bird Nest, the main Olympic Stadium of Beijing, 2008. (Wang D, 2008) Moreover, every steel accessory different from each other and no single one is same as others. The two towers two-way tilt 6 degrees, which is linked at 162 meters in height by a 14-storey cantilevered structure, which outriggers 67 and 75 meters respectively. There is no support in the closure of air space for the L-shaped mesh structure, which forms a closed loop generally.

Characteristics of this building:

1. large board underground To overcome the problem of pressure difference between different parts, engineers decide to add a 120 meters in length and width, 8 meters in height concrete board. This plank can reduce the pressure effectively from 200 tons per square meter to less than 110 tons per square meter. The construction group made 7m thick reinforced concrete slabs, each contain up to 39 000m3 of concrete and 5000 tones of reinforcement. Totally, 133 343m3 of concrete went into the foundations of the Towers.

2. the anomalous diamonds made of steel On the glass wall of 100, 000 square meters, there distributes more than 27400 blocks of anomalous diamonds. Under the sunshine, especially on the bad air condition in Beijing, the steel bars look like emerged into the glass which forms fantastic visual effect. However, these diamonds do not build for beauty. Such diamonds as there were are carefully calculated and form a supporting structure themselves. The diamonds are dense in places suffered a lot of load while sparse in little-load places. Such design can transfer the load to the surface and underground.

3. the expensive but detailed model To persuade some experts in the Construction Department of Chinese government, the design group made three types of model: joint test, composite column and shaking table test model which were built by Qinghua, Tongji University separately. The shaking table test model is a 9 meters high worth of more than 1 million dollars. The model was put on a platform which can mimic earthquake. There are 600 sensors on the model to supervise the displacement of 10,000 elements making up the model. The model proves that, although unsafe it is seem to be, the CCTV headquarter can resist 9 level earthquake.

CCTV new headquarter can be regarded as an incredible architectural achievement in China as well as in the world regarding lots of engineering obstacles it overcame. It has now stood at the center of the CBD in Beijing and worked as the media center of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games successfully. I believe that this building will become one of the new symbols of Beijing.

Reference: 1. Chris Carrol, etc, CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China: Building the structure, The Arup Journal 2/2008

    2.	Wang Dacheng, CCTV construction: difficulties and solutions, Chinese Architecture