Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Meanwhile, back in the land of 'car crash' design ... I think the economic meltdown has put a dent in the craving for expensive, high-fashion, high-end novelty shapes and spectacle architecture, no matter how well some of it may have suited the programmatic requirements of the institutions, and the profit margins of the high-end condo developers, who commissioned it. Not being a movement geared to providing moderately priced and sensibly designed places for ordinary people to live or work in it was always limited in what it could deliver. It's already beginning to look like a thing of the past, the work of a small group of jetlagged starchitects, hired by a few high-end clients - and the novelty shapes aren't actually turning out to be as varied as many of us assumed they would be when the cycle began in the heady days of the mid-90s.