With its Pisa-esque lean, audacious multi-storey overhang and irregular steel-veined facade, the huge China Central Television tower taking shape in central Beijing is a self-conscious architectural icon that challenges the very idea of the skyscrapers clustered around it. Part of a $600m-plus complex that also includes a slope-sided entertainment centre/hotel and a circular low-rise service building, the tower will become the home of Beijing’s government broadcaster CCTV, in effect the world’s largest corporate headquarters.

Ole Scheeren, architect-in-charge of the 49-storey building, has made an elaborate defence of a design that has proved controversial among citizens of the Chinese capital. Deriding the “conceptual implosion” of conventional urban towers, he demanded to know whether “nothing [is] left but the self-referential quality of a vertical line, which desperately seeks [to compensate for the lack of] identity, with a decorative top sprouting a flower, pagoda style or modernist composition?”