Designing the Weird

As of late there has been a recent email chain going around about some of the most odd buildings in the world. Yes, being odd for oddity sake has its purposes. Sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's done just to be proven that it can be. But when creating monumental structures for years to come, it creates an unnecessary "WTF" moment. The Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (roughly translated the museum of modern art or MUMOK for short) takes the cake on being completely weird.

It's a normal looking structure with a house upside down built into the roof like it's cutting the building in half. It is interesting at first, in fact quite comical. But are we moving in a direction where that is what is 'modern?' Architecture is still an art form and to discredit the basic joys of architecture seems to be making a mockery of it. In hundreds of years, hopefully that museum will still be standing. Would a work of art like that still be considered modern?

It seems that modernity is something relative to what we see now. In fifty years, a building like that would be considered contemporary, in hundreds, it will be the ancient past. Do we as a society want to be known as being the generation that was weird for weird's sake? Are we designing art that when looked back upon in the future, people are going to think, "Wow thank God we're not them." Everlasting things like the MUMOK should be designed with the idea that they represent a culture today and sometimes that culture doesn't share the idea of pushing the envelope of being strange.