Facade completed on OMA's CCTV headquarters

Construction of China Central Television Headquarters (CCTV) has reached a new milestone with the installation of the final glass panels of the façade.

Construction of the 600000 m2, Office of Metropolitain Architecture (OMA) designed CCTV building, which will be home to China's national broadcaster, began in September 2004 on the 20 ha site of an abandoned motorcycle factory in Beijing's new Central Business District (CPD).

After connecting the two leaning towers in December 2007 and topping out structural steel works in March 2008, the CCTV headquarters is due for completion at the end of 2009.

The adjacent Television Cultural Centre (TVCC) is expected to open early next year. The third building on the site, the circular service building, is in operation and is presently being used for broadcasting of the Olympic Games.

Once completed, the CCTV building will transform the usually inaccessible environment of media and television production and give access to the public via the ‘Visitor's Loop', a dedicated path of circulation, which allows people to view and experience multiple aspects of the production process.

The lowest floor of the overhang, the large cantilever projecting 75 m out, at a height of 162 m, will feature a public media museum and a viewing deck with sights across the city and vertically down through circular glass floor openings.

The facades of CCTV portray the irregular geometry of the building's steel structure, and according to OMA partner in charge of the project Ole Scheeren, its "sometimes dense, sometimes more open grid of diagonals forms the stability system of the building and reflects the distribution of forces that the structure experiences under different load conditions."