What grabs the imagination as much as anything is the vision the building offers of this particular period in history. Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era much as the great works of the early Modernists did theirs.

Mr. Koolhaas has been one of architecture’s most influential thinkers since the late 1970s, when his book “Delirious New York” offered a celebration of the “culture of congestion” in Manhattan at a time when many middle-class New Yorkers were still fleeing to the suburbs.

Over the next few decades he established himself as both an architect of extraordinary talent and the profession’s reigning enfant terrible. His 1997 competition entry for an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, which would have sunk the museum’s beloved sculpture garden into the ground and stowed curators in a tower labeled MoMA Inc., enraged many people at that institution but could well have reinvigorated an institution struggling to reimagine its identity. The 2004 Seattle Central Library, an uneven stack of slabs shrink-wrapped in a glass-and-steel web, was at once an evocative memorial to the conventional library and a monument to the new Information Age.

Mr. Koolhaas was offered the CCTV commission in late 2002, around the time he was invited to participate in redevelopment plans for ground zero in Lower Manhattan, and he immediately decided he could not take on both. “It was a matter of focus,” he said. By then the redevelopment plans at ground zero had become so politically and emotionally heated that Mr. Koolhaas was skeptical that anything of real architectural value could be produced there.