The new building seems to be a setting for a fantasy film: its main volume, which will house the congress center, hotel, housing, offices and shops, looks like a giant sphere of glass and steel. An additional rectangular block will be built nearby, as if hovering above the ground: there will be an exhibition center, another hotel and shops.
Koolhaas cites the return to a pure geometric form as the merit of the project and its main difference from most modern buildings. The perfection of these stereometric figures should be associated with an ideal world, be a universal symbol for Eastern and Western culture, for primitive society and for futurists, for the present moment and for eternity.
The RAK Convention and Exhibition Center will be built next to Gateway City, a new city in the desert also designed by OMA. His project will be presented in detail at the International Design Forum (IDF 07) in Dubai later this month, and the city plan was first shown to the public at the MIPIM exhibition in Cannes in March.
At the same time, Koolhaas sought clarification from Lord Foster's office, seeing too many similarities between his project (which started in November 2006) and the British architect's new plan for the autonomous city of Masdar for Abu Dhabi.
Both of these projects are "green" cities, rectangular in plan, with a perpendicular grid of street planning, with increased building density. At first glance, these are not so original signs to think about deliberate borrowing, but the Koolhaas bureau believes that their version is "the most radical in the world" and emphasizes their leadership in its development.
