Hasta La Ideas

In October of last year, then-OMA employee Ole Scheeren said he believed that Beijing’s Mandarin Hotel/CCTV office, which he and Rem Koolhaas had designed but was severely damaged by a massive fire in early 2009 before it had even opened, was still salvageable. Turns out he might be right. Crews have begun working on the charred remains of the skyscraper, planning to remove most of the steel and decorative portions of the building and reconstructing it based on the original plans using its still-intact and relatively healthy concrete bones. No word yet on how long the rebuilding will take, but we’d guess that it might take nearly as long as it did to construct the original, given how much damage the exterior suffered (here’s our on the ground report from seeing the building up close when we were in Beijing shortly after the fire). Meanwhile, eight more defendants have recently been prosecuted for the fire, which started after fireworks shot from adjacent buildings landed inside the tower. These eight join 21 others who had previously been tried and convicted in relation to the incident.

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