Zone Gadget

Combining the two concepts, creating a hybrid of the generic and the fantastic, Mr. Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture comes up with a new plan of Masterpiece Generic City of 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City.

The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. The tilting intertwined towers of a complex dubbed “the loop” are a more elaborate version of Mr. Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television, being built in Beijing.

[NY]