One of the most radical creators of architecture for the globalization era, Rem Koolhaas develops large scale projects for complex urban situations, involving intersections with transport devices and megastructures of services. He operates with the ideas of "generic city" (urban sprawl with no history, superficial, amorphous, incoherent and congested, reactive to all planning effort) and of "bigness" (quality given by the dimensions of the larger buildings) as a feature of the metropolises.

The gigantic projects of Koolhaas oppose, by its enormity, the traditional conceptions of exterior and interior, escaping to formal perception. Scales that imply non-measurability. Architecture confronting the limitless, the immensely large. This is, for him, the ultimate form of architecture. The size of the building determines the program, the complexity and dimensions of the urban situations, turning impracticable all planning intentions. A scale that discourages all embracing visions: such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural or urbanistic gesture.

Atlanta, Singapore and Yokohama are understood as landscape, a random juxtaposition of disconnected parts. Convulsive architecture that spreads infinitely, uncontrollable, not compromised anymore with the creation of order and coherence. The pervasive urbanization transformed the urban condition.

If a new urbanism is possible, says Koolhaas, it will not be about the more or less permanent object disposal, but about irrigation of territories. It will not search anymore for steady patterns, but the creation of fields that accommodate processes that resist to be crystallized in definitive forms. Not an imposition of limits, but the suppression of borders. Not the identification of elements, but the discovery of hybrids. Not anymore obsessed with the city, but with the manipulation of the infrastructure for infinite intensifications and diversifications, short-circuits and redistributions _ the reinvention of the urban space.

The approach that Koolhaas makes of the cities has been based in one principle: the capacity that they have, facing 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, is placed the São Vito building problem. 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 large 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.

Once the State cannot anymore face urban and social questions of these proportions, which are the strategies that the city will be able to establish? The large scale urban development projects for the area, promoted by big real estate corporations and international financial capital, tend to consider _ as in the case of the SP Tower _ the building demolition and the incorporation of its area into the urban enclave dominated by a new megastructure. Which other alternatives, in the context of a large urban restructuring of the region, could be considered?

Koolhaas proposal consists in the installation, at the São Vito building, of a new elevator, endowed with the most advanced technical features. The building is taken in the scope of a possible activation of the region. The installation of a new elevator is then not a structural operation. It is a way to develop the connections between the building and the urban area. The facilitated access may allow the blooming of other activities and other forms of occupation, opening possibilities that can be used by the inhabitants. A reconfiguration that happens through urban dynamics.

It is not proposed retaking the revitalization strategies of central areas, en vogue in the 80’s. These policies, essentially preservationists, would tend to focus the building from the patrimonial point of view, as a monument. Associated to public assistance policies, aiming at the improvement of living conditions in the building, they would little contribute to the structural changes imposed by the situation extension and complexity.

It is the case of engendering another process. To initiate a debate in the city on its habitational conditions and potential for urban renovation in large scale. To create a mobilizing fact, that agglutinates inhabitants, corporations, city administration, architects and media. This process is more interesting than its actual result, the effective installation of the equipment in the building. In contrast to conventional urbanistic and artistic procedures, which in general resume to object insertions, more or less functional or esthetical, in the urban space, this intervention is centered in the dynamics that can be produced.

Here the process _ the suppliers position, reactions from the building management, financing alternatives, and a possible of participation of the city government _ becomes exemplary of an urban intervention strategy, highly flexible, based in the engagement of different institutions and social groups. Opposed to the development projects, centralized and programmatic, proposed by big international corporations.

The question of accessibility is, for Koolhaas, part of the paradigmatic changes that had occurred in the approach of architecture, dictated by the problem of the large metropolitan scales. Beyond certain scale, the building becomes so enormous that the distance between the center and the perimeter suppresses all possibility of meaning. There is no more any relation between its different components. This architecture depends on the technology, overall the elevator, capable to establish mechanical relations between the atomized elements.

The São Vito building does not appear, therefore, as a modern architecture unit, but as a verticalization element. Condition sine qua non to the city restructuring. Modernism should not be evaluated strictly in architectural terms. The future of São Paulo is being played in another dimension, beyond architecture.