In fact, everyday good architecture should not even be about the
building, it should be about the people. If the building isn’t intended as some kind of public monument or centerpiece, it shouldn’t draw much attention to itself. Frank Gehry is a wanton violator of this rule: when he decided to design homes for the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans, he created a discordant batch of
hyper-contemporary houses that “riffed” on the region’s traditional vernacular architecture. Rather than being concerned to give people comfortable houses that fit in with their surroundings and suited the preferences of the residents, Gehry designed houses that screamed for attention and were fundamentally
about themselves rather than about the people of the city he ostensibly cared about. Good buildings recede seamlessly into their surroundings; Gehry’s blare like an industrial klaxon. Similarly, when a building like Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s Kunsthaus in Austria (the building at the top of this article) is placed in the middle of an old village, the entire fabric of the village is disrupted. The Kunsthaus (a representative example of “blobitecture”) cannot coexist peacefully with the things surrounding it, because it’s impossible to stop looking at it. Like the streaker at the football game, the building parades in front of us with such vulgar shamelessness that no amount of willpower can peel our eyes away.