CCTV, aka the Big Underpants Building. The Chinese government, apparently, doesn’t get the joke. They suggest: Harmonious Gate, Happy Geometry, Peak of the Ages, New Angle, TV Magic Cube, TV Rubik’s Cube, or Future Window. It’s like when, to Greenpeace’s horror, on-line voters named that whale Mr. Splashy Pants. Nicknames help us connect to things that are otherwise too big, too complicated, too foreign to understand. Wolf Prix wants people to nickname his buildings. The unnamable scares us. Like a whale in the water, wrote Melville: unpaintable. Good architecture is photogenic, or photogenic architecture is good architecture, or so they say. But not for Rem. That’s probably why his books are so intimidating, and so hard to read.
Now that it’s almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn’t create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit. [Rem via Der Spiegel]
