"For years the architect has been lauded for ushering in a new cultural era," says Nancy McDonald in Maclean's magazine. "But the climate appears to be shifting... Either the guy's a genius, or he has us all fooled."
This is only a partially rhetorical question. As Robert Tracinski noted a while back:

For a man feted as the greatest living architect, Gehry's style is surprisingly one-note. Almost all of his buildings look like giant piles of crumpled tin foil. Their most interesting feature -- the interior spaces tend to be giant blank boxes -- is an exterior cladding of titanium sheets folded into wild, discombobulated shapes. These are supposedly works of "abstract sculpture," but in fact they are carefully designed to achieve a specific effect: not to look elegant or graceful, but to look jumbled, chaotic, nonsensical. . .
Nonsense only sells for so long. Turns out that you really can only fool some of the people some of the time.
"Turns out that you really can only fool some of the people some of the time."
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but wouldn't it be great if that time were a lot shorter, and the cost a lot lower!