In a carefully choreographed pre-dawn operation last weekend, the huge sloping twin towers of Beijing’s new CCTV building were bolted together to create what will eventually be a 70-metre-long overhang at a height of 160m.

It was, says the architect in charge Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), a moment of “early-morning intimacy”, for the steel towers, which each weigh somewhere around 50,000 tonnes.