March 2006 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Can you fail to be impressed by the malignant stupidity of this building proposed for downtown Louisville, the 61-story Museum Plaza,designed by Rem Koolhaas's Office of Metropolitan Architecture? It violates everything that we can reasonably expect about the energy-scarce future -- most particularly the poor prospects for running skyscrapers and megastructures. But even if that were not an issue, and even on its own terms, what a monstrous thing this is! Its attitude to its urban context -- just off Louisville's Main Street -- is so disrespectful that the context is left out altogether in the rendering above. You'd think all that remained of Louisville a few years from now is a post-atomic-blast hardpan desert. Indeed, the aim of all Koolhaas's work has been to confound our expectations about how the city and its buildings ought to work, and to find ever more innovative ways to make people uncomfortable, while doing everything possible to disregard the public realm. Is it not evident by now that the cutting edge of architecture is a razor blade poised against our society's own throat.