OMA also built the mixed-use De Rotterdam on the waterfront of the firm's hometown—almost petite by comparison at a mere 1.74 million square feet, but a giant in that Dutch port city, both for its scale and its muscular design.

The three other big projects we feature in this month's Big issue are all in Asia. Working in the Far East, “you become a scale junkie,” says Ole Scheeren, who was OMA's partner in charge for the CCTV building until he left the firm in 2010 to start his own practice in Beijing and Hong Kong. His Interlace housing complex in Singapore, which he designed while at OMA, is an arresting and ingenious twist on the dreary forests of residential high-rises that dominate so many rapidly growing Asian cities. Rather than build a dozen such generic structures for a new development, as his client had asked, Scheeren proposed “toppling the towers.” That scheme created a huge interconnected structure, 1.8 million square feet, with a dynamic positioning of the long horizontal volumes that allows unusual views, courtyards, and other communal spaces.