OMA’s Blox project stacks a museum, offices, gym, restaurant and housing in a provocative attempt to condense the thrilling energy of a city into a single structure – but the result is a gloomy glass monolith
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In this seminal book, [Koolhaas] devoted a chapter to the wonder of the Downtown Athletic Club, a 1930s Manhattan skyscraper that combined swimming pools, boxing gyms, golf course, restaurants and apartments in a vertiginous layer cake. He rejoiced in the “fantastic juxtaposition of its activities” where each floor provided “infinitely unpredictable intrigue” and forced its users to “surrender to the definitive instability of life in the metropolis”. The building was a machine, he enthused, “to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse”.
OMA has been trying to emulate the model ever since, with buildings that expose, provoke and create friction between their different users and functions, with mixed success. Its De Rotterdam project promised a dynamic integration of housing, offices and hotel, but ended up as three siloed towers on a plinth. The Timmerhuis, also in Rotterdam, was planned as a cloud of apartments suspended above a one-stop “civic agora” for council services, but the city pulled out and the great open forum was walled in. So has OMA finally succeeded in bringing a shock dose of multi-levelled metropolitan dynamism to the urbane context of Copenhagen?
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