Still, it's getting harder to ignore the fact that Koolhaas' work has moved away from the kind of inventive economy—maximum novelty in minimum square footage—that marked his earliest buildings, like this dance theater in The Hague. In 2000, he told the New York Times, "I like to do things that on first sight have a degree of simplicity but show their complexity in the way they are used or at second glance." But quite a few projects he's finished since then has been showy at every glance. His Prada store in New York opened just a few weeks after 9/11, at a moment when its over-the-top materialism seemed in bad taste. And the new buildings in Seattle, Chicago, and Beijing seem comfortable, to say the least, with pure spectacle.