“a barbershop, a beautiful barbershop formed by curves of alabaster stone. It would resemble an albino slug that’s eating a pile of white towels. Instead of sitting on swivel chairs during your haircut, you’d rest on a big egg that rises out of an indoor reflecting pool. [...]
Every day, I open the phone book and call a handful of random barbershops to see if anyone is interested, but I have yet to find a barber with the vision and bravery required.” – Zaha Hadid
— clickhole.com
I had dreamed of the day when the visionary and hysterical ClickHole would lampoon starchitects. Now that day has come, and the resulting listicle does not disappoint.
Here's Frank Gehry's lost project for the "Evil Concert Hall":
"Instead of holding music, the evil hall would just house endless screaming and clanking chains, establishing an intriguing duality that exists not just in the Disney universe but throughout the entirety of the cosmos. The Disney family only approved the good building.”
And poor Santiago Calatrava, disappointed to realize his design wasn't so original after all:
“My best design ever was actually the Taj Mahal, but I found out that it had already been made. It was extremely humiliating, because I learned that while pitching it for a museum in Barcelona. When I unveiled the model, the clients said, ‘This is the Taj Mahal. India has one,’ and I told them I was pretty sure they didn’t, because I had just invented it. We looked up the Taj Mahal, and sure enough, it was the same building!”
The only lacking thing about the piece is its length. Where's Bjarke Ingels, Peter Eisenman, Jeanne Gang, or Rem Koolhaas? Perhaps ClickHole's selection of "famous architects" offers the purist etymological evidence for the definition of "starchitects", as they're presumed to be reliably recognizable to anyone in ClickHole's massive, non-architecture-specific audience. Or perhaps they just ran out of starchitect tropes to play off of. Regardless, ClickHole, please send more.
7 Comments
Rem:
“I had an idea for a jagged glass-and-steel volcano that shoots out lava. Unfortunately, the engineers told me that there’s no way to hook up a building to the earth’s core and pump up magma, and that only real volcanoes can do that. Instead, I ended up building The Shard in London, which is pointy like a volcano, except not as good, because it’s filled with people and not molten rock. All of my buildings are failures in that regard.”
Also in the Discussion Forum. Amelia, great minds!
Of course Libeskind's should have been "I wanted to design a building that exhibited the power and exhilaration of Eddie Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some" era. Then I actually was finally able to, so I did it over and over again!"
Ha! Great minds indeed, Donna. Calatrava's Taj Mahal bit had me in tears.
i did that once in studio (back in the college years) with a steven holl building
i was like, no way. i just made this up. it meets the context and program and whatnot. it was sort of a thing with blobbyness and greg lynn i was exploring. and the other guy was like, look. and i was like, well shit. even earlier that happened with a gwathmey siegel. i mean come on, who even knows who they are?
first of all Donna, Mr. Van Halen never tuned his guitar....
and great minds naturally land on the Taj Mahal when driinking about architecture. If we were all traditionalists we would do same....
by the way Calatrava's wings blew me an older architect away today, its as radical as the Guggenheim by FLW for NYC in my opinion....
the comments were "reminds me of 911"...said "not like that SOM freedom tower right?"....we carried on to the Code Consultants (former commisioners)
Calatrava dropped a gift off (you will see NYC) and the 50 custom bucket scissor lifts to make it happen well worth it. (some contractor explained a while back that each bucket on the lift is custom for this project to fit between to bones - 50 of them, lots of trades on site, etc...)
now to avoiding doing something productive....lets see if I can deliver -
hold on - the fact that we pick on Zaha Hadid, by we I mean the general douche bag architecture public - is totally unfair....not sure how we arrived there....well I kind of know and don't care....anyway....
the late Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems:
"I always wanted to plant a giant Penis in London. I'm not English, originally. Then this guy who works for Norman Foster for years, like years, draws a Penis, another ridiculous English surname Shuttleworth. Doesn't the working class have shorter names like Foster? He draws a penis, calls it the Gherkin! I never built my Penis, but some other Englishman delivered the larger one to London."
Only the English could literally deliver on the Phallic symbol, without actually being literal....look that makes sense, your English just isn't that good!
Clickhole or the NYTimes? Hard to tell the difference
+++ Fred
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