The CCTV Tower in Beijing is almost finished. My review is in:
CCTV Tower
It’s a word-class spectacle of an institution of mindless stupidity,
demonstrating how the modernism of a bold architect led to a bureaucrat's wicked dream of greatness, built on monopoly money generated from a propaganda machine.
A pure form but complete lack of content, meaning and soul, displays a strange bastard of quickly-acquired wealth and unthinking Westernization.
A shinning edifice without a slightest hint of Chineseness, ironically hosting the nation’s supposed cultural custodian,
reveals an alien, rigid ideology imposed from above, ever ready to suppress the native aesthetics of a great and ancient civilization.
The sense of its structural instability indeed foretells the inevitable downfall of an absolutist, unaccountable fantasy.
(Photo: Simon Elegant/Time China Blog)
