The recent cluster of towers rising in Rotterdam, marked by a logic of speculative densification and criss-crossed volumetrics, embodies a paradox: in their pursuit of monumental real estate presence, they visually, symbolically, and urbanistically obscure Rem Koolhaas's De Rotterdam, a building that until recently dominated the skyline with its totemic presence, subtly offset yet imposing in its disciplined modernity and modular repetition, projecting an image of functional sophistication and restrained ambition that now appears outdated next to the formal exuberance and commercial hybridity of the newer developments, which pile up typologies, densify programmes and aestheticise surplus through cantilevers, sky-bridges and gilded crowns that saturate rather than engage the skyline, revealing not so much an urban evolution as a transformation of land into financial asset where architecture becomes a marker of investment value rather than a cultural artefact or urban device, and in this context, the figure of the architect-author is displaced by investment consortiums, collaborative studios and packaged sustainability rhetoric rendered in sunset-hued visuals, rendering Koolhaas’s project —ironically from one of the most incisive theorists of urban capitalism— a melancholic backdrop, as if the iconic had expired in the face of serial spectacle and vertical intensification stripped of any civic or symbolic epic, where the new no longer signals progress but becomes a simulacrum of contemporaneity, a decorative extrusion of capital veiled in golden cladding that conceals the erosion of narrative form in the city.
