The CCTV Headquarters is a skyscraper in the Beijing Central Business District. The building is the headquarters of China Central Television. Groundbreaking took place on September 22, 2004 and the building’s facade was completed in Jun 2008. Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA were the architects in charge for the building, while Arup provided the complex engineering design. It stands at 234 metres (768 ft) tall and has 54 floors.
The main building is not a traditional tower, but a loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 473,000 square metres (about 5 million square feet) of floor space, creating an irregular grid on the building’s facade with an open center. The construction of the building is considered to be a structural challenge, especially because it is in a seismic zone. Because of its radical shape, it’s said the taxi driver first came up its nickname dà kùchǎ (大裤衩), meaning “Big Boxer Shorts”.
The building was built in two buildings that were joined to became one building December 26, 2007. In order not to lock in structural differentials this connection was planned to be completed in the early morning when the steel in the two towers cooled to the same temperature. The CCTV building was part of a media park intended to form a landscape of public entertainment, outdoor filming areas, and production studios as an extension of the central green axis of the CBD.