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    Tall buildings and mega-buildings, by nature, are indicators of the state of capitalism, as they are often very expensive and often very prominent. But along with this there is a point of interest in that from building to building, there is little variance in aesthetic or structure. They are often primarily clad in glass, sometimes entirely, and they often feature clean lines or soft edges that renders them to look like hard candy. This hard candy architecture highlights an interesting phenomenon, in my opinion, that is shaping city-skylines around the world. The tall buildings are icons. They are so often observed from a distance, such as in a skyline, and doing so creates a false reduction of scale so irrelative of the human scale that the tallest, most prominent buildings on the skyline have broken out of the “traditional” façade and massing treatments. In other words, busy-ness is not business. This is influenced largely by the economy of the mega-structures—they are very expensive buildings to produce and, as such, many of them follow the critical path of least resistance from concept to object. These buildings typically come off as un-inspired. This is largely the focus of Rem Koolhaas’ “Bigness” as it applies to capitalism.

 

    Architects and firms like Bjarke Ingels and BIG have successfully created a business model that maximizes the efficiency of the firm’s work. He is said to have “liberated” the field of architecture from its own “hand-wringing” (TIME) in a similar vein of Rem Koolhaas. BIG is very effective at generating large amounts of capital, and they use that capital to produce simple, un-fussy works that are not bound by a singular artistic vision. That isn’t to say that he doesn’t care about the aesthetic, he’s simply more focused on the economics that allows his firm to produce these high-quality “iconic” buildings. I think it will be interesting to watch this trend, to see if more architects follow BIG’s lead in producing this kind of “pop architecture.”