Daily Inspiration Quote by Rem Koolhaas

Power speaks in floor plans before it speaks in slogans. When Rem Koolhaas talks about CCTV needing to "make its presence felt", he is doing what he always does at his most provocative: treating architecture as an operating system for public life, not a neutral container. The ellipses in that first sentence are telling. They leave room for the unspoken premise that a state broadcaster in Beijing does not merely occupy real estate; it must project authority, modernity, inevitability.

"To generate a space and to define a space" sounds like designerly abstraction, but the real action is political. "Generate" implies creation: a new kind of urban room, a landmark that produces attention and circulation. "Define" implies control: boundaries, legibility, who belongs where. For a media institution - especially one historically tied to state messaging - the building becomes an argument about visibility. It doesn't just house broadcasts; it performs broadcasting, turning the city into an audience.

Context matters: Koolhaas and OMA entered China during the 2000s boom, when the country was using spectacular architecture to announce global arrival. CCTV's looping form reads as both swagger and self-containment, a monument that refuses the clean, upright symbolism of the skyscraper while still delivering the same punch: you cannot miss us. The subtext is the bargain of signature architecture in an authoritarian-modernizing context: form as cultural capital, space as soft power, presence as permission to shape how a society sees itself.