Beijing

Ten days in Beijing were enough to get an impression of the metropole’s October weather: from the deepest smog blanketing the whole city in a cloud of grey to clear blue skies with enough sunshine to leave our faces slightly burned. Beijing ’s tallest building was under construction at the time in the immediate neighbourhood of the CCTV tower, next to at least five other skyscrapers. As a result, there were only a few places in the city where you could get an unobstructed view of the CCTV Tower – a building of enormous dimensions. Apart from a chew choice angles, only taller buildings allowed for an unobstructed view of the tower. When walking or driving through the city, the CCTV Tower would always make a sudden and short lived appearance between other buildings. Each of these perspectives offered entirely different impressions of the building such that its whole image could only be assembled from fragments – unless you had a helicopter. Due to the structure of the tower, every perspective seemed entirely different. From some positions it actually resembled a loop, from others it was more like an overhanging rock. There were thus various difficulties in producing an image of the CCTV Tower. On one hand there were only a few two to three-storey houses remaining in the area, overshadowed by the CCTV tower. On the other, in addition to the other skyscrapers in the immediate vicinity, there were also countless others spread throughout city, making it impossible to combine them all with the CCTV Tower in a single shot.