The approach that Koolhaas makes of the cities has been based in one principle: the capacity that they have, in the global integration processes, of transforming themselves.

For him, São Paulo is confronted to this impasse: will it be capable of a complete reconfiguration?

It is not just a vegetative growth, within the existing urban structure. São Paulo, in comparison to Asian megalopolises, is a stagnated city. It gets interested in moving or it does not have any future.

In other words: will São Paulo promote the conditions to integrate the economy and network of global metropolises?

More: could this reconfiguration be made in an architectural and urbanistic pattern different from those imposed by international corporate capital?

It is in this context that, for Koolhaas, the question of the Sâo Vito building is placed. Only modernist construction in the region, the building is exemplary of the failed renovating attempt of the downtown area.

In few years the building has deteriorated and was occupied by a great number of socially displaced people (homeless, unemployed or engaged on informal activities).

Today the building, despite its 25 floors, has very precarious basic services, from water supply to elevators. An emblematic case of the urbanistic impasses of the city.

If São Paulo do not discover how to solve, in this decade, a problem as of this building, situated in one of the most propitious areas for urban development projects, this will indicate that it will not achieve insertion in the dynamics and format of the large world metropolises.

The strategy of the megaedification was confronted by Koolhaas through the of notion "bigness". For him, beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of bigness, when the size alone of a building embodies a program and instigates a regimen of complexity. Within an enormous building the distance between its different components ruptures all the connections and relations of meaning.

The scale by itself tends to push the different elements of the construction to a complete autonomy. The building then is conceived as a constellation of different spaces and programs, coexisting in a unique entity. Only megascale can detonate the unexpected, the proliferation of events in a single container.

The SP Tower project would hold flexibility and urbanístic architectural necessary to potentialize its immense dimensions? Or it would be only a large structure rigidly articulating diverse equipment and programs? The Bonaventure Hotel can serve here of reference. This large structure stuck at downtown Los Angeles, intents to be a total space, an entire world, a sort of city in miniature.

The Bonaventure does not aim at any urban environment transformation. In place of the opposition between public and private space it engenders a nobody-land. An infinite space fully constructed and after-urban, where the corporate property abolished the individual private property without becoming public.

The urban development projects in large scale for São Paulo central area, promoted by big real estate corporations and international financial capital, tend to propose _ as in the SP Tower case _ the demolition of the São Vito building and the incorporation of its area into an urban enclave dominated by a new megastructure.

Which other alternatives, in the context of a large urban restructuring of the region, could be intended?