You're Designing Architecture that was Chosen for You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg

The link above is to a clip from arguably the most famous scene in the 2006 cinematic masterpiece The Devil Wears Prada. Aside from being a fantastic display of Meryl Streep’s acting chops, it also offers us a lesson on architectural criticism. In the scene, Andy laughs at what she considers to be the frivolous and unrealistic work of the high fashion industry. In response, Miranda Priestly reveals to her that in the moment she is criticizing high fashion, she is wearing clothes that were dictated in part by the people in the room with her. 

Much in the same way, people criticize Peter Eisenman’s or Bjarke Ingels’s “radical” approach to architecture. They say that Eisenman’s work is non-functional, that BIG’s is too iconic or simplistic, but in reality, we need these architects to push boundaries and ask the (no pun intended) big questions. We need the Eisenmans of the world to hold a mirror up to society and to the architecture industry because the radical architecture they generate trickles down through architectural practice into every office and becomes something real and applicable. The radical or nonfunctional becomes useful and we can extract something from them that can be applied to our own works. The reality is that the same architects who criticize Peter Eisenman are often using some of his principles in their designs, whether they realize it or not.