Separated At Birth?

"Do you ever wonder what’s wrong with architects?" Andy Rooney might ask. "Do they have some secret ritual where they agree to turn off their common sense when they design their buildings?"

Look at the two buildings above. The first was in an episode of the sitcom Wings called So Long, Frank Lloyd Wrong. A young couple’s architect designed a house for them shaped like the number 7. It was so terrible that the couple was afraid they couldn’t tell the architect what they thought of the design without hurting his feelings.

A few years later, the French architect Christian DePortzamparc turned the 7 upside down and won the annual $100,000 Pritzker Prize for best architect in the world. Obviously Portzamparc was chosen for the award by other architects – who else could like such a ridiculous inhuman anti-urban conception?