Victimary thinking, celebrity and the CCTV building

The growing influence of globalisation and its accompanying mobilities, both corporeal and remote, are particularly clearly portrayed in the context of the cityscape where the built environment contains evidence of contemporaneous developments in culture. This is in no small part because the global population is now primarily housed in cities, a shift that has occurred concurrently with the growing economic significance of cities that now compete with one another in a manner that exceeds national boundaries. An associated set of highly complex cultural dynamics and an emergent aesthetic sensibility have been identified by a growing number of scholars; one that is marked by a set of concerns that appear contradictory, at times paradoxical and ever ambivalent. Stark illustration of this both kinetic and unstable sensibility is offered through the buildings constructed based on the designs of celebrity architects, or "starchitects." The figure of the starchitect is paradigmatic of how agency has been effected by the changes outlined here, which seem to indicate the emergence of phenomena on a global scale that move beyond the conditions of postmodernity. These demonstrations of prestige participate in cultural narratives associated with the historical relationship between high and popular culture, and by default, the market system and its culture. It is argued below that Eric Gans's explanations of the epochal conditions that exceed postmodernity—and their cultural implications—under the label of "post-millennialism" offer a very fruitful means by which to explain the activity of the starchitect. The discussion takes as an explanatory case study the example of the CCTV building in Beijing, the headquarters of the Chinese public broadcaster designed by Rem Koolhaas. The building portrays his consciousness of the paradoxical doubling of our survival and demise, the ecology of which is emergent from both our capacity for symbolic representation and the exploitation of the material conditions that constitute these non-exigent ecological circumstances in the first instance.