China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters
CCTV‘s new headquarters in Beijing wears its engineering on its sleeve. So complex is this 768-foot-tall anti-skyscraper that the architects, the Netherlands-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture, chose to show off the structural seams for visual effect.
The building is a continuous loop (resembling a twisted doughnut to some, “big shorts” to others), a shape that would normally be too stiff to stand up against the region’s famously epic earthquakes. The solution: Engineers at Arup enclosed the more than five-million-square-foot building in a triangulated steel surface, forming what’s called a diagrid, and optimized the pattern to meet structural demands. The triangles are dense in regions that bear heavy loads and spare where loads are light. This gives the building, whose interiors are now under construction, enough flexibility to survive the kind of ungodly tremors that occur once every 2,500 years.
