Artists need to have a wild imagination but somehow when this is immortalized into stone and bricks, it sometimes forces one to question artistic license.
A recent ad by a local pharmaceutical company in the U.K. has done just that. The subject of a 'baloney pony' tall story is the famous 'Gherkin Building (30 St Mary Axe)'. A morphed photo of the building has been portrayed to show a 'flaccid phallus' by a local pharmaceutical chain for 'erectile dysfunction treatment'.
According to Dezeen, the ad appeared on the Nov.13 issue of the Evening Standard. The image of the manipulated Gherkin building is displayed on top with the line "Lost the Perk in Your Gherkin?"
But this structure isn't the sole torch-bearer of the red-faced architecture community. There are examples galore.
Earlier, Realty Today had reported how 'People's Daily' China's state run newspaper was getting a 'giant penis-shaped' headquarters. Although the building was under construction and would look nothing like a 'phallus' after completion, it became the butt of an international social-media joke.
People started pointing out that the headquarters completely complemented the nearby China Central TV headquarter building, which look like giant underpants!
Calling the designs abstract, constructions range from a 'picnic-basket shaped building' to a 'dog peeing over a museum'. Therefore, it is not surprising that some buildings should portray 'certain parts of the human anatomy.'
But how far does art allow one to go?
Related: See the Strangest Buildings of the World
Ayn Rand once said "A building has integrity just like a man, and just as seldom". The saying holds true for the buildings of the modern world we live in today. The weird forms of today's skyscrapers only spark one question in our minds, 'what were they thinking while drawing the blueprints?'
Just like the farmer cannot bury his mistakes, an architectural blooper is almost irremovable. Famous columnist Walter B Hayward once suggested that architects hide their mistakes growing vines around the structure.
Architects, and especially builders who are not architects, make mistakes about as often as not; and the awful thing about it is that their mistakes have to be right out in plain sight, unless they can be hidden by vines and trees.
But imagine growing vines on the Gherkin Building. It will only trigger off a fresh round of sniggers!
The Flip Side
However, in their defense, the architects say that the varying designs are a part and parcel of the building diversification. As cities grow more compact and crowded, there is only scope for vertical development. And how long can one keep building tall rectangles? Shapes give beauty.
"The more you densify a city, the more congestion will increase, however technology changes ... cities so packed that they will no longer function ... vertical sprawl," Leon Krier said in an interview with the Guardian in 2006.
The Gherkin Building was lauded as much as it was mocked for its form. The Guardian wrote about the building:
"It is modern and ancient; it is site-specific; it sculpts the sky. It is a monument and a mirror. It makes you see London in a new way. It does things that artists - people who are officially called that - have given up even trying to do."
Architecture is an art of civilization that belongs to the civilized. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age".
