The same might be said for designer, though usually fatality is normally not a factor. We learned a lot of how cities work and how people live in cities when we started building Cobusian Radiant Cities. What are these Radiant Cities? They are the housing projects, or more commonly called The Projects. They are that bad end of town that is nothing more than government funded slums. They were originally conceived as Utopian cities where everyone can live comfortably and happily ever after. The Pruit Igo housing project taught us that they are certainly one of the worst ideas ever rendered by the Modernist. Pruit Igo, three years after it was built, underwent major structural renovations... that is it was demolished, because of the massive amounts of vandalism, rape, murder, theft, and drug dealing it propagated.
Now do we blame Minoru Yamasaki for designing Pruit Igo? (Yamasaki design the World Trade Center, which so happened to be destroyed in a similar fashion under different circumstances). Or do we blame Le Corbusier for even thinking up the Unite prototype? OR... do we thank them for teaching us a thing or two? Do we thank them for risking and ruining their reputations to teach us such things?
How about a different example. I'll stay with architects. The John Hancock Tower in Boston, MA designed by I.M. Pei (he designed the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre) was a major disaster. He wanted to maximize the glass glazing and minimize the mullions that hold the glass in place. Turns out that the sizing of mullions simply was not enough. In short, what happened was that temperature fluctuations caused the glass panes to fail. Although this was a huge and costly failure, engineers certainly learned plenty about engineering glass facades from the John Hancock Tower's mistakes. In fact, the engineering of full-glass facades would not be where it is today if Pei and Partners had not stuck their reputations out on the line. Although Pei's reputation was tarnished, most engineers don't really blame him that much, simply because they learned a lot from these failures.
So what about other architects? Ones that we love to point and wag the finger at for their mistakes? Frank Gehry is particularly under the gun right now, since a good deal of his buildings are leaking. Do we wag the finger at him for designing buildings that are inevitably going to have faulty construction? Really, we should be thanking him for giving us a plethora of designs that we should never repeat. Renzo Piano teaches us something at the California Academy of Sciences that inverted glass domes naturally create waterfalls (no, the wet-floor signs did not come with the architecture). We should thank him for teaching us that.
I always enjoyed this particular quote from Frank Lloyd Wright : "If it doesn't leak, then it's not architecture."
We thank individuals of the Darwin Awards for teaching us to not do stupid things like depressurizing your anus with six atmospheric units of pressure, or trying to muffle the noise of a firecracker by placing it between your thighs. We also thank them for displacing themselves from the gene pool. Why shouldn't designers be thanked for having bad ideas that turn out to monstrous? Why not thank them for placing certain design ideas outside the design "idea pool"?
Sometimes faulty designs aren't the worst that can happen to a building. For Peter Eisenman this is certainly the case :
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