But, come on, this is such a patent rip-off.
I worked for aA and played a key role in the design of this project.
What I can tell you is that this project was not on our radar, at all - this is the first time I've seen it. I began working on the project, which was strictly in massing at the time, around 2005-2006. The firm's website (
http://www.meyer-vanschooten.nl/) shows it as being completed around 2007. To say that the design is a patent rip-off is unfair. The massing and overall concept are completely different, not to mention the material treatment. Are all glass boxes a ripoff of Lever House?
From the massing stage, we used the CCTV building as an inspiration for the patterning on the exterior of the truss box (given that we were trying to pull off a ~20m cantilever there is a lot more structure in the truss at the point where it cantilevers out, so it was nice to express that), but eventually that yielded to structural requirements and it became a bit more regular... it was chaotic at first. How it ended up, I'm not sure (I left the office in 2007), but the guiding principles were lightness, transparency, and structural expression - which Le Grand Cour does not convey, as others have stated
Full disclosure: Some time in 2007, I came across a project which horrified both myself and the associate in charge... there is a project in the netherlands which is even more similar to Pier 27 than the one you have shown. It is a 3-storey truss box which sits on top of another building... I tried to find it with google image search but failed

When I first found it, my jaw dropped and I thought "awwww crap. how is this possible?!" But what can you do? The bottom line is, it's *incredibly* hard to come up with something "original" - we truly thought we had (I would still argue that aA has), but inevitably you find out someone has beaten you to it, or you find similar pieces in other buildings. That's par for the course in a creative field, but as an observer you should try to keep in mind the all-important science mantra: "Correlation does not equal causation"
