[DouseAuthott]

Today's Times reports Rem Koolhaas' hotel and cultural complex in China is aflame.


Fire Engulfs Beijing Hotel Complex

BEIJING — A fierce fire engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings on Monday, the last day of festivities for the lunar new year when the city was ablaze with fireworks.

By late evening the blaze was still raging and the cause remained unknown, but it seemed clear that the 34-story structure, not yet completed, had been rendered unusable.

The building, a luxury hotel and cultural complex designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is part of China Central Television’s new headquarters, an angular two-legged behemoth built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics last year.

Firefighters, their ladders only reaching up a dozen or so floors, could do little to contain the blaze, a spectacular wall of flames eerily reflected in the glass skin of the adjacent CCTV tower.

The CCTV complex was a hugely expensive trophy of the pre-Olympics building boom, the result of many billions of dollars that the ruling Communist Party had devoted to making Beijing a city of the future. The main CCTV tower appeared untouched by the fire.

The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this summer, was unoccupied at the time, hotel executives said.

According to Chinese television, the fire began at 8:27 p.m., although witnesses said they spotted flames as early as 7:45 p.m. Within 20 minutes, they said, the fire had spread from the lower floors to the building’s crown. Black smoke drifted across the night sky, obliterating a full moon.

The authorities blocked off a thoroughfare known as the Third Ring Road, which runs adjacent to the complex. Subway cars running underneath the site were briefly halted, stranding thousands of passengers. Frantic police officers tried to shoo away huge crowds as sirens wailed and fireworks lit up the skyline. People watching noted that the timing of the fire — coming at the end of the spring festival — was inauspicious.

While errant fireworks were suspected as a possible cause, fires of such magnitude are nonetheless highly unusual in Beijing.

The city had been crackling with fireworks for the annual Lantern Festival, the final day of the two-week long Chinese New Year holiday.

Witnesses said that construction crews had been working nonstop on the building but it was not immediately clear if anyone was injured.

Claire Sandner, a spokeswoman for Mandarin Oriental, said none of the hotel’s 60 employees were inside at the time of the fire. She said it was too early to assess the extent of the damage although the devastation appeared to be complete.

A spokesman for Mr. Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, called the fire “a great tragedy.” The spokesman, Stefan Petermann, said the firm had won the competition for the building in 2002; groundbreaking took place in 2004, and the building was due to be completed this May.

As they stood gaping at the blaze, many people said the fire would be widely interpreted as a poor omen for the coming year. Fan Wenxin, 20, a waiter who works a few blocks from the complex, rattled off a litany of disasters that have shaken China in recent months.

Although the past year included a triumphal Olympics, he said there had also been a spate of ominous events, among them the Sichuan earthquake, the riots in Tibet and a drought that has left Beijing and much of northern China without precipitation for more than three months. “This does not bode well for the new year,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/wo...eijing.html?hp

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There is also a video here. Quite incredible:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-210127

(please note reader comments below the video about melted steel and 9/11. Fascinating.
If anyone wants to open up a thread about the subject here, let me know.)

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