From omnilife to omnicity.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Americas !Ojo! - Brief Article

THE LURE OF magnificent cities hidden somewhere on the American frontier has sparked the imaginations of New World adventurers from time immemorial. Think only of El Dorado, Machu Picchu, and the Fountain of Youth. But if Mexican herbal supplement magnate Jorge Vergara realizes his vision, the road to this latest metropolis of dreams will lead a half-hour north from Guadalajara into the desert to arrive at ... the world's most avant-garde cockfighting ring.

Through the 1990s, Vergara erected his billion-dollar company, Grupo Omnilife, on the genius of his shoe-leather slapping salesmanship of health beverages. It is less than surprising, therefore, that the builder of a company based on an intricately structured pyramidal distribution scheme--founded in 1991 with three employees and six distributors--should have inside him the plans to construct, if not a Maya pyramid exactly, then certainly a palenque, or an open-air arena in the round.

The palenque is in fact just one of many buildings--including convention center, art museum, company headquarters, and industrial fairpark--that Vergara has commissioned, each by a world-class architect, and each with only the barest of client instructions. "We will give them the freedom to do the kind of things they could never do in the United States or Europe," he says. "Wild, crazy things."

Such wide-open terms have helped to assemble a team of the most cutting-edge architects at work today, many who have made their names in the rarified world of museum design. Anglo-Iraqi Zaha Hadid, who designed the art section of London's Millennium Dome, is responsible for the Omnilife hotel. The trend-setting Daniel Libeskind, whose startling Jewish Museum in Berlin has recently opened, is assigned the Omnilife university. Philip Johnson, the ninety-five-year-old dean of American architecture who co-designed the elegantly austere Seagram Building in New York almost fifty years ago and many performing arts centers since then, is working on a fancifully colored children's museum.

Other top firms include the Coop Himmelblau, led by the Viennese Wolf Prix, who has been given the Omnilife entertainment complex; Parisian Jean Nouvel, whose Institut du Monde Arabe is...