Rem Koolhaas isn't someone you'd call a conventional architect.
A computer-generated image of the new CCTV building designed by Rem Koolhaas.He is the type of person who writes books filled with pictures of skyscrapers being sliced in half, interviews with television chefs, and soft-core pornography.
He's the type of person who one minute tries to redesign the European Union flag, the next has coffee with Italian fashion designers.
More to the point, he is the type of person who, in emotional moments, says architecture is "too slow" to be relevant to today's world.
Rem Koolhaas then, doesn't have much in common with other architects from his native Netherlands, let alone Chinese ones.
Yet, it's exactly this balding, hawk-like, who may have a great impact on Beijing's architectural future.
CCTV in hyperbuilding
In April work will start on the new headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV), the national TV network, beside the central eastern Third Ring Road in Beijing.
The building complex is designed by Koolhaas and his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
It will be a building, Koolhaas says, of "barbaric beauty," of "unimaginable size and complexity." It will be a 230-meter-high arch formed by two L-shaped towers containing over 400,000 square metres of floor space; a building big enough to house 200 television stations.
It's a building, Koolhaas hopes, that will shift development in Beijing away from the "lonely" and "hideous" nature of skyscrapers towards "hyperbuildings" buildings that house such enormous populations they become urban centres themselves.
It's a building that will "revolutionize" the Beijing landscape, as well as the world of architecture.
The CCTV building isn't, though, the only way Koolhaas is influencing the future of Beijing: He's designed the city's new Xinhua Bookstore. He's leading a government study into how to preserve the city's architectural heritage. He was one of the judges of the Olympic Stadium design competition. And he's even contemplating moving his teaching practice from Harvard to the Chinese capital.
When Koolhaas said, during a lecture in London, England, "I want to be involved in the future of the city, not just one building," he certainly meant it.
Koolhaas was in London, officially, to collect the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the architectural world's equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar.
Unofficially, he was there to lecture Britain's architects about why they should be looking to China.
"Our creativity in cities stopped just as China's cities started to boom," he said. "We ceased looking to the future and started looking back, started listening to people like Prince Charles (a regular campaigner against modern architecture)."
There is, though, he said, an opportunity for change. "We are being called to build a new city in China, there is a chance there for a new architecture, and we should be involved in that."
Koolhaas has been trying to create a "new architecture" ever since he joined the profession in the late-1960s, after stints working as a journalist and Hollywood scriptwriter.
In 1978, just as many architects were looking for ways to control the spread and congestion of cities, Koolhaas published "Delirious New York," a polemical, slogan-led celebration of the "culture of congestion," and a promise to do all he could to fuel its growth.
The world was changing fast, Koolhaas said, architects could do little to stop it, but they could help it along.
If architecture in the late-1970s needed a dose of controversy, Koolhaas certainly provided it. "Delirious New York" instantly made Koolhaas into an architectural icon; an architectural icon, that is, who had never built a house.
New architecture
Since then, Koolhaas has continued to develop this "new architecture:" an architecture that embraces change and technology rather than trying to control it; an architecture that has pushed him to the verge of bankruptcy once and seen him lose numerous contracts; an architecture that has seen him build some of the most majestic buildings of recent years.
In Bordeaux, France, in 1998, he built a three-storey house for a paralyzed man and his family, the living space of which was made mostly of glass. Koolhaas put the house's study onto a piston so that it could move between all three floors, allowing the man to get from his bedroom to his wine cellar without having to feel like an invalid, and allowing his family to live in a house that didn't look like it was made for a paraplegic.
The house was named Time magazine's building of the year.
In New York, in 2001, meanwhile, he built a shop for Prada, a veritable maze of display cases, that features changing rooms with televisions in them so that a customer can see what the back of an outfit looks like without having to crane his or her neck.
For those buildings, and numerous others, Koolhaas has been called everything from "a giant on the international stage" to "a mechanical baseball-pitching machine."
The latter comment, made by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, was, apparently, a compliment about Koolhaas' ability to always hit the target with his designs.
Adventure in China
It is with his work in Beijing, though, that Koolhaas has found the perfect opportunity to realize his "new architecture." Although, in London, that "new architecture" seemed simply to mean, anything but skyscrapers.
"I have decided to launch a campaign against the skyscraper, that hideous, mediocre form of architecture," he said with typical overstatement. "In the 1970s there was a genuine creativity to it that changed the way we live our lives, but today we only have an empty version of it, only competing in height.
"The actual point of the skyscraper - to increase worker density - has been lost. Skyscrapers are now only momentary points of high density spaced so far apart that they don't actually increase density at all."
As Koolhaas sees it, because the skyscraper has failed to increase worker density, it can be removed from our cities. It isn't needed anymore. Density can be achieved through other, more communal, forms of architecture.
"We've (OMA) come up with two types: a very low-rise series of buildings, or a single, condensed hyperbuilding. What we're doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding."
CCTV's new headquarters then, Koolhaas hopes, will become its own city, its own community, where around 10,000 workers will eat, drink and attempt to produce kung fu movies to rival those of any Hong Kong studio.
Every part of the TV production process will be put into the building's arch, from the newsrooms, to the marketing men, to the tea boys.
It's the first time a television network of CCTV's size has been squeezed into one building. It's "an experiment," "a risk," which rival broadcasters will probably look at as a model of inefficiency.
Perhaps more exciting than the CCTV building, though, are the measures Koolhaas will soon put forward, through his Beijing Preservation Study, to help preserve Beijing's architectural heritage from the ravages of tourism.
In London, he talked about such revolutionary possibilities as the creation of "sacrifice zones" of historic architecture to allow other zones to be tourist free.
If anyone is hoping, though, that Koolhaas is champing at the bit to protect Beijing's few remaining siheyuan, the traditional courtyard homes found in the city centre, he or she would be mistaken.
As far as he is concerned, they are only as worth preserving as any other type of architecture in the city, be it 1960's workers' housing or sports stadiums.
It's true that the Chinese have treated their past unsentimentally at times.
"But this just means the texture of the city is more fragile than that of Western cities, so the whole notion of preservation needs to be reinterpreted in this context."
Whether that reinterpretation will actually occur, only time will tell. But, one thing's for certain, there are few other architects working today who think in such far-reaching terms, who think beyond the boundaries of bricks and mortar.
