China wonders if showcase national TV headquarters are monuments to porn.
In the run-up to last year’s Beijing Olympics, when the city unveiled a post-modern building that houses the state broadcaster CCTV’s headquarters, it was celebrated as an architectural showcase of a new and modern China.
But barely a year later, China’s citizens are fuming that the zany building and an annexe, built at a cost of 5 billion yuan (about $735 million) by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhas, should be “blown up” because they are “monuments to pornography” that bring shame on the Chinese people.
The controversy blew up sky-high after a retired professor of architecture dug out an old issue of an international architectural design magazine that suggested, with graphic images, that the main CCTV building and its annexe were designed to represent, respectively, the female and male genitalia. “The main building,” professor Xiao Mo wrote, “represents a naked woman bent over, with her posterior facing the audience; the annexe represents a giant penis!”
Echoing the hard-line sentiments of an art critic and fellow-professor (who even argued that the architect should be killed), Xiao called for the building and the annexe to be “blown up” because they brought “colossal shame” on the Chinese people and “should not be allowed to exist”.
The Chinese media and netizens seized on these comments and went into paroxysms of rage. “If such a thing is allowed to stand in the capital of the ancient (Chinese) civilisation, it brings eternal shame to our forefathers,” one commentator noted. Another called for a public effort to “sue Koolhas for defrauding the Chinese people”.
Earlier this week, the official Chinese media joined in the uproar, quoting, in some cases, local Chinese architects who criticised the craze for a “foreign design” as underlying the “humiliation”. The nationalistic Global Times cited an online poll that said that 47% of participants believed the CCTV buildings were “pornographic”.
The controversy heated up despite sobering comments from renowned artist Ai Weiwei (the designer of the Olympic Stadium), who said the criticism of the buildings by “ill-informed” people was a “ridiculous joke”.
Even a clarification from Koolhas that the lewd images associated with the CCTV buildings did not have his approval, didn’t convince the average Chinese, who still believes the architect cashed in on the Chinese weakness for “foreign design” — and played a $735 million dirty joke on 1.3 billion people.
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