“Frankly, I cannot believe that in the short span of our history we have experimented with and exhausted the possibilities of form.”

Jeffrey Kipnis

The appearance of buildings informs our understanding of them. We can look at a building and attempt to comprehend it without inhabiting it. We draw upon fragments of our memory to correlate certain specific symbols and aspects of its exterior and establish relationships – The cross on the church, the display window at a shop, etc. This helps us navigate our worlds as most buildings seek to conform to the visual nature of the category they belong to. Nikolaus Pevsner has written a rather large book, ‘A History of Building types’, which re-emphasizes the same point – that a façade must communicate the internal function of the building within established norms 

However, as architects, we all love crazy buildings. Buildings that swoop and swerve, that arrest the eye – that try and be more than just containers of space. Buildings that have fantastic forms. Certain buildings don’t even have to swoop and swerve to be crazy – they are just so far removed our original understanding that we look at them and say – surely that can’t be a hotel – wow, how did they do that? The Mountain, by BIG, is a prime example of a façade being generated by an absolutely new way of looking at a building typology.


Unfortunately, human intelligence and stupidity are somewhat evenly distributed. It would be wonderful if all architects were gifted geniuses who could create fantastically original forms, but the reality means that a mass of followers inanely copy forms created by the few gifted ones. There are millions who aspire to be Hadid or Gehry, and incorporate the visual medium in their architecture. Hence the ugliness of the modern world

The Challenge of the New Façade
Of course, the counterpoint to this is the sheer wastefulness of facades that are simply pretending to be something or convey something that they really do not represent. Is that really what architecture should be looking to do with itself? Have architects become so self-serving and neurotic that their only concern is how to make their buildings somehow ‘look different’?


The façade of a building has to do more these days. Free from supporting the load for over a century, it now has to be almost alive with responsiveness to the environment. It needs to react to occupancy, weather, erosion, pollution and even generate the energy required to run the building it covers.


Are we prepared to give the façade of the building greater responsibilities than just prettiness? Can we look forward to buildings that not only look good, but do a lot of things that transform buildings from simple containers of space to meaningful contributors to human life?


Meanwhile, don’t forget that we still like crazy buildings. We want to push the envelope (literally) and create new patterns with our creativity. Let us examine how architecture can continue to be the subject matter for art.