Super-size Design

Subscribe

Twenty years ago, Rem Koolhaas published a fat doorstop of a book, S, M, L, XL, which included his manifesto on Bigness: “Bigness is ultimate architecture,” he wrote. “Only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields.” 

Ole Scheeren is no stranger to megaprojects. As a former partner and director at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), he led the design and construction of the 5.1 million-square-foot CCTV Headquarters in Beijing and was the lead designer of the MahaNakhon Tower in Bangkok, which, when completed in 2016, will be the tallest in the city at 77 stories and 1,030 feet.

When I went to Rotterdam to see the largest single building in The Netherlands, the eponymous De Rotterdam by OMA, it reminded me of something. But I couldn't put my finger on it. 

In the realm of supertall skyscrapers, the recently completed Pearl River Tower (PRT) in Guangzhou, China, isn't that tall.

On a barren patch of desert in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto basin, just 50 miles west of the site where scientists detonated the first nuclear weapon, Foster + Partners took on an extraordinary task: to construct the world’s first private hangar facility for spaceflight.

As founder and chairman of Foster+Partners, Norman Foster has created projects at every scale but may be best known for such innovative tall buildings as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters in Hong Kong (1986), the Swiss Re tower in London, a.k.a. “the Gherkin” (2004), and the Hearst Tower in New York (2006).

The future looms large for seven forthcoming projects around the globe that demonstrate ambition in scale and form.