The problem of form-making

People recognize images of our image-culture in buildings that have a unfamiliar form. I think strange forms puzzle us and trigger a process of trying to find analogies to try to understand the form.

When an architect realizes that the human mind works that way, he tries using Iconography. Here are some examples:

The well-known Burj Al Arab..



The London Olympic Stadium proposed by FOA uses the iconography of the muscle.



The Beijing Olympic Stadium designed by Herzog & de Meuron derive from the birds nest concept. The name of the stadium is Beijing Olympic Stadium, but due to the concept, the public tend to refer to is as the bird nest, which goes to show that how powerful Iconography is in masking the idea in architecture.



The Yokohama Cruise Terminal and the Hokusai Wave.



The ING House in Amsterdam of the Dutch architects Meyer & Van Schooten must be the worst architecture ever in the world, I bet a first year student can come up with something much more interesting. The building resembles a shoe or an ice skating shoe.


Concept in architecture should be abstract, the theme or idea should not derive from a physical object. Selling an architecture idea that was extruded from an existing object is a wrong move, I have to admit that famous architects tend to do this due to the sellable idea to the broader public. Iconography is a cancer in the architecture world.

Design is all about ideas and it doesn’t matter if the end products take the shape of a man or an object, it is how well one can persuade their listeners to agree with them.

Happy new year everyone!