I do not know what is meant by "horizontal skyscraper." Nevertheless, Steven Holl's Horizontal Skyscraper Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China is stunning and stands is the architectural work that most impressed me in 2011.
It's really what the buildings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation should have been.
What Bloomberg has to say about the new Seattle buildings:
Artifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying...The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.
What NYT said about the new Shenzhen buildings:
Steven Holl, the center’s architect, is a major talent, with significant projects in Europe and America, but his most potent urban ideas have sat on shelves for decades.Each work might be seen as a reflection of the state of their cities.In China he was given the chance to dust them off, and the results are extraordinary. Nicknamed the “Horizontal Skyscraper,” the Vanke Center is a surreal hybrid — part building, part landscape, part infrastructure. Its jagged form, propped up above a tropical park on piers up to 50 feet high, gives identity to a characterless landscape. It demonstrates what can happen when talented architects are allowed to practice their craft uninhibited by creative restrictions (or, to be fair, by the high labor costs of most developed societies).
