In a world full of congestion and medium-scaled humanist buildings, there are many advantages to these mysterious FOL buildings, which have small footprints, small profiles, and large graphic elevations. Their size and slenderness resonate with contemporary building types: megamats provide massive floor plates for highly sought-after creative and tech spaces; superslabs respond to the tiny housing revolution with contracted floor plate depths. Defying the extruded, gravity-centric city of the 20th century, FOL buildings drop down from above, creating cities on top of cities, something called “Hypercities.” Where they land, they create discrete, bounded spaces like interiors of giant houses.

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This is a new form of adaptive re-use, where the old and new city dock together without fusing, in a non-binary
condition we might refer to as a third object. The third object is virtual, but concrete, and it contains chunks of
dense, bounded, three dimensional urban space within the sprawl. This is not continuous city-building as we
know it—it is discrete world building. It preserves the history of a city by piling things up and leaving everything
in play rather than maintaining the charade that the city is a holistic anthropomorphic body that needs to be continuously mended. Parts remain at a distance, resonating, anticipating the next layer.