Rem Koolhaas became very famous with the publication of his marvelous book, "Delirious New York," in 1978 and would go on to create such dazzling new structures as the Central Library in Seattle in 2004 and, most recently, the CCTV Headquarters Building, a huge, angled, looping structure in Beijing.

The developers of the recently topped-out residential condominium tower known as One Madison Park designed by Cetra-Ruddy at the foot of Madison Avenue at 23rd Street recently created considerable excitement in architectural circles when they revealed they had commissioned Mr. Koolhaas to design a 22-story annex at the rear of the new tower at 23 East 22nd Street.

A rendering of the annex appeared August 22 in an article by Edwin Heathcote in the August 22, 2008 edition of the Financial Times. Mr. Heathcote is the architecture critic of the Financial Times.

In his article, Mr. Healthcote notes that good design has begun to reappear in Manhattan and claimed that "the real change is yet to come."

"But," the article continued, "the real change is yet to come. Three skyscrapers currently mooted are among the most intriguing proposals in contemporary architecture. The game was kicked off by French architect Jean Nouvel's MoMA tower (below), a 75-storey latticework spike. Engineering as aesthetic, this is structure stripped bare: even when complete, it will evoke the visceral beauty of the construction process. Herzog & De Meuron's Leonard Street Tower in Tribeca offers a new take on the skyscraper (the design of which will be fully revealed next month): a stack of crystalline boxes bearing down on and squeezing a blobby Anish Kapoor sculpture at its base. Finally, there is 23 East 22nd Street...by Rotterdam's Office for Metropolitan Architecture. It comes to us from the office of Rem Koolhaas....This is an eccentric, clever building, one to be taken seriously. The proposal (revealed exclusively to the FT) is typically provocative. Invoking a world of ziggurats and pyramids somewhere between Metropolis, Dada and Busby Berkeley, OMA brings us essence of Manhattan. It boils down to those steps, the set-backs and terracing so characteristic of the city - but used the wrong way round. Instead of set-backs, we have step-outs, a tottering tower cantilevered over its neighbours, allowing it to grab extra space from thin air while still permitting light to reach its neighbours. Twenty-three East 22nd Street is the zenith of a burst of creativity from the world's top architecture firms, each bringing to bear the intellectual, structural and aesthetic focus that has been so lacking in Manhattan's architecture since the last great explosion of corporate expression in the early 1960s."

The "tottering" design of the tower's rendering, which rises from a quite small plot and cantilevers fully over a low-rise building just to its east, appears to be quite an astounding engineering feat although it bears no contextual relationship to its illustrious neighbors such as the Clock Tower of the former Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, its great north annex building and the Flatiron Building and it clashes madly with the sleek glass facade of One Madison Park, which will have 68 residential condominium apartments. Some of its cantilevered upper floors will have views up Madison Avenue but most will not have views of Madison Square Park.