I have lived in apartments my entire adult life, which means I have strong opinions about buildings and absolutely no power to change one of them. That is precisely the situation architecture memes were invented for. Everyone online is now an urban planner, which is alarming, but at least they are angry at the right things: highways, gray boxes, and whoever keeps approving the columns. I find this enormously comforting, so here is the evidence, room by room.
Turns out you can just undo it.
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My gutters could never.
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Concrete's secret clown era.
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Five hundred years and still no leaks.
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Fjord, and I will fight about it.
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The HOA only checks the front.
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The reply did all the work.
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An on-ramp to absolutely nowhere.
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Load-bearing confidence.
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Parking for the car and the yacht.
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The original gated community.
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Rain finally doing something nice.
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My nervous system just unclenched.
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Tectonic plates do not take questions.
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The house went goth.
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Medieval entrance, mid-century exit.
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One car or twelve brunches.
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Rain always votes hip.
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One has a cathedral, one has a merge lane.
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One of these buildings hugs you back.
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Somebody please never touch this.
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Architecture memes
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Nothing unites strangers like hating a highway. The urban planning memes here are mostly one argument made with increasing despair: someone once looked at a lovely riverfront or an old city center and decided what it really needed was eight lanes and a cloverleaf. I don’t drive, and I still take this personally. A whole restaurant fitting into one parking spot is not a fun fact. It’s an indictment.
My least favorite thing a building can do is apologize for existing, and new ones apologize constantly. They come in gray, they come in black, and they usually replace something with a chimney and a garden that somebody loved. I am aware that old buildings had no plumbing and the occasional plague. I still think they won the argument.
Then again, freedom has its charms, and weird architecture is what happens when a homeowner is given far too much of it. A castle tower bolted onto a ranch house is not a design. It’s a midlife crisis with a mortgage, and I admire it the way I admire people who wear pajamas to the airport: from a distance, with real fear. The architecture fails are honestly my favorite part, because each one proves somebody said yes in a meeting.
Everyone has an opinion about buildings because everyone has to live in them, walk past them, or sit in traffic beside them. Nobody asks for your input when the gray box goes up, so you give it later, online, to strangers, which is the only democracy most of us get. Architecture memes are a public comment period that never closes, and I intend to keep commenting until someone stops me.
Underneath all the complaining there is something hopeful, which I resent. People keep posting the beautiful ones too: the courtyard that catches the rain, the cliff village that has stood for three thousand years, the riverfront that got its grass back. It turns out mistakes are fixable, and nobody really wants to live inside a spreadsheet. We want a place that looks like someone cared, though personally I would settle for a window that opens.
The highway is gone. The grass is back. The columns are still a problem.
If you still have opinions to burn, our evil architecture gallery is full of buildings that clearly resent their tenants, and the architecture mockups vs reality collection shows what happens when the drawing meets the budget. Real estate snoops will love our crazy Zillow listings, and the design fails archive covers everything else that someone, somewhere, approved. Bring a hard hat. Leave your hopes in the lobby.
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