guardian | Beijing's building boom has already spawned a wealth of novelty forms, with a stadium in the shape of a bird's nest, a theatre nicknamed the egg, and a TV headquarters that has been likened to a giant pair of underpants. But the official People's Daily newspaper might have trumped them all with its new office building, which appears to be modelled on a colossal phallus.
Photos of the scaffold-shrouded shaft have been circulating on Weibo,
the Chinese micro-blogging site, to the authorities' dismay, with
censors working overtime to remove the offending images. "It seems the
People's Daily is going to rise up, there's hope for the Chinese dream,"
commented one user. "Of course the national mouthpiece should be imposing," added another.
The 150m-tall tower, located in the city's eastern business district, appropriately near OMA's pants-shaped CCTV headquarters, is the work of architect Zhou Qi, a professor at Jiangsu's Southeast University.
"Our way of expression is kind of extreme," Zhou told the Modern Express
newspaper, "different from the culture of moderation that Chinese
people are accustomed to." He explained the design was inspired not by
part of his anatomy, but by the traditional Chinese philosophy of "round
sky and square earth" – the tower tapers from a square base to a
cylindrical top. He claimed that the elongated spherical form was
designed to recall the Chinese character for "people" from above. The
fact it might look like a male member from below was clearly a secondary
concern.
