Normally this city frowns on building shapes that do anything more
daring than go up and down or side to side. Sure, we have a venerable
corkscrew in the Guggenheim, but we don’t have much truck with blobs,
birds’ nests, leaning towers, or glass pretzels. A pair of
soon-to-be-built condos nudge at that resistance to foreign forms,
though, and suggest that even a weakened housing market still has some
architectural kick. These two projects—one by the Swiss wizards of the
Beijing stadium, Herzog & de Meuron, the other by the Dutch swashbuckler
Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture—keep their
radicalism quiet, and both spring from the city’s heart as well as its
turf.