CCTV Headquarters

OMA's winning 2002 competition entry rejected the usual skyscraper — a single tower straining upward — for a closed loop: two leaning towers, one holding administration and offices and the other production and broadcasting, joined at the top by an overhanging cantilever and at the base by a shared podium. The result reads less as a building than as a tube bent back on itself, its structure exposed as an irregular diagonal grid, denser wherever seismic and gravity loads run highest. At 234 metres, the two towers lean toward each other at six degrees and meet 162 metres above the ground; a public loop lets visitors walk the cantilever itself, ending in a view over the Beijing CBD. Construction began in 2004 and the façade was finished by January 2008, in time for the Olympics, though fit-out continued to 2012. An adjoining building in the same complex, the Television Cultural Center, burned down in February 2009 after fireworks ignited its skin during a Lunar New Year celebration, killing one firefighter; the headquarters itself was undamaged. It has been renamed China Media Group Headquarters since CCTV's 2018 merger into the new state broadcaster.