Architectural Cosplay

Architectural Cosplay

Why are we still designing buildings that pretend to be things?

There is a particularly egregious building doing the rounds in the design press at the moment, described as an elite centre of excellence for badminton. You might reasonably assume that the conceptual premise for a building project like this would place performance at its core.

But why, then, is it necessary for it to be a literal replica of a badminton shuttlecock — not metaphorically, not as a subtle nod to sporting culture, but quite literally: a scaled concrete-and-glass projectile, complete with a projecting light show to emulate the feathers?

Sadly, it is unlikely to be the last mimetic architectural concept, where buildings are styles to resemble objects.

I would preface this by saying it’s not impossible to have both a high-performance solution and a ‘looky-likey’ form — if that’s your thing. But why do it?

One simple argument against is this: the moment the look-alike aesthetic becomes a primary driver of the design, you inevitably produce two outcomes. First, resources are diverted throughout the consultation, design, and build process away from solving meaningful functional, economic, performance, and engineering problems, and towards maintaining the purity of a singular, ornamental objective.

So, for example, a disproportionate amount of any design coordination meeting ends up being absorbed by specialists discussing how to preserve the integrity of the shuttlecock “look”, rather than addressing more immediate and substantive issues.

The result is predictable: the overall solution is compromised.

The second is this: how do you resolve the conflict between the supremacy of the aesthetic outcome and the supremacy of the performance outcome?

Maybe, just maybe, in this particular instance, performance was given priority — which might go some way to explaining the weakness of the finished result from a visual standpoint. But I would wager that, in most cases where an architect and developer choose to pursue a scaled version of a literal object, the opposite is true — and that performance ends up being driven by aesthetic supremacy.

Architecture periodically rediscovers the urge to turn buildings into objects. Guitars. Baskets. Lotus flowers. Giant ducks. Sails. Musical instruments. We keep doing it, and the profession rewards it with LinkedIn applause and dutiful design-press reverence — Dezeen, to its credit, at least allows the comments to say what everyone is thinking — while the uncomfortable truth remains that a novelty object has been submitted for planning, and is being earnestly marketed as serious work by its backers, developers, and architects.

Let me be clear about what I am actually arguing here. If a standalone business wants to construct a giant replica of its product, that is its prerogative — peculiar, aesthetically unfortunate, but ultimately harmless. This article is about something more serious: commercial architecture (and interiors), the kind that shapes cities, defines skylines, and consumes significant public or private investment — and the growing tendency for it to behave like an oversized prop. As sculpture, this would be perfectly acceptable. As architecture, it is a failure of priorities.

And there are some really extreme examples that fit firmly into this category:

The National Fisheries Development Board Headquarters in Hyderabad: a government office building designed as a giant fish. The Elephant Tower in Bangkok, a mixed-use complex that renders an elephant in full, trunk and all, across the façade. The Piano and Violin Building in Huainan, China — a civic exhibition space shaped as a grand piano with an attached glass violin.

There are, of course, more subtle and insidious versions of the same habit. Opera houses with façades intended to read as stage curtains. Museums shaped like flowers, or hands gesturing warmth and welcome. And nowhere is this more pervasive than in commercial interiors — particularly shopping malls — where the “concept” is often a paper-thin reference to a local custom or artefact, then indiscriminately applied across every surface in as many materials as possible.

Anyone who has spent time in a commercial architecture practice will recognise the pattern: concepts lifted from nature, from craft, from ceramics — not because they are meaningful, but because they provide something, anything, to anchor decisions against. Done carefully, it can work. But more often than not, it is simply a convenient narrative imposed after the fact.

In Learning from Las Vegas, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown gave us the term “the duck” — a building whose entire form becomes the symbol. The name came from a roadside shop in New York shaped like a giant duck. Their point was not simply that this was amusing. It was that the building had stopped being architecture. It had become a prop.

Some people will argue, at this point, that architecture has always borrowed from other things. The Romans adopted Greek column orders. Renaissance architects studied classical proportion and order. British civic buildings referenced Roman temples. Isn’t all architecture, in some sense, referential?

Yes. But that comparison tends to collapse under basic scrutiny.

When Roman architects borrowed from Greek buildings, they adopted structural logic, spatial organisation, and proportion systems that made buildings perform better. They evolved an architectural language. They did not decide that the most appropriate form for a bathhouse was the slipper that bathers wore to the baths.

That is the distinction that matters. One is architectural influence. The other is architectural cosplay.

If Roman bathhouse architects had operated with the logic now fashionable in certain skylines, the entrance would have been at the heel. The pools would have sat in the arch. The roof would have followed the outline of the sole. Vitruvius would have wept.

That level of literal thinking — building as object, form as symbol, architecture as oversized diagram — is precisely what these projects represent. And it is no more sophisticated for being executed at the scale of a city block.

If an ice cream shop must look like an ice cream cone, and a car showroom must look like a car, and a doctor’s surgery must resemble a stethoscope, and a school must be shaped like a book or a computer — then urban planning becomes a catalogue derived from a deranged novelty shop.

Even in contexts where symbolic playfulness might be appropriate, architecture resists the literal. A zoo does not design the elephant enclosure in the shape of an elephant. At most, an animal silhouette appears in the branding. That is the job of a graphic designer. Architecture still focuses on space, structure, and the experience of being in a place.

Buildings are where things happen. Architecture does not need costumes. It needs intelligence, rigour, and the professional confidence to resist the demand for instant legibility at the expense of everything that actually matters.

Why does it keep happening? Because it’s easy — easy to explain, easy to render, and far easier to get approved than a building whose value lies in the complexity of how it actually works.

Governments want symbols. Developers want landmarks. Marketing departments want images that communicate instantly and travel well on a phone screen — buildings are now consumed as images first and experienced second. And mid-ranking designers and architects need a narrative to secure approval from their design leaders.

I was once in a design kickoff meeting with a major developer who insisted the team think deeply about their concept. To illustrate what they meant, they produced a concept pack from a previous mall project. The concept, they announced, was a Victorian music box.

Oversized imitation brass cogs scattered across the atrium. Mechanical gears fixed to columns. Musical notes etched onto escalator balustrades.

And it was evident that fewer meaningful conversations had taken place about customer journey, retail positioning, trade mix, circulation logic, or shopfront design — the things that actually determine whether a mall succeeds.

The concept became the decoration. The architecture disappeared behind it.

The building requires no explanation. It generates its own press coverage in the age of Instagram. The KPI is satisfied — because it can be. A building that reads instantly as an object is easy to measure: press coverage, social media reach, landmark recognisability. Circulation logic, spatial clarity, and urban contribution are not.

You will not see many of these buildings in London or New York, and that is not an accident. Architectural culture in those cities developed, over generations, a strong professional resistance to literalism — not because they lack ambition, but because they accumulated enough peer critique to filter out the gimmicks. When money arrives faster than architectural culture matures, spectacle tends to fill the gap.

A real architectural concept explains how a building works. It might address circulation logic, spatial hierarchy, daylight strategy, climate response, or the relationship between the building and the city around it. These are ideas that shape how a building performs. 

“Organised around a central courtyard to improve daylight and reduce cooling load” is a concept. “Inspired by a flower” is a motif.

A final point.

If your concept does not survive structure, space, and use, it is neither architecture nor design. It is set dressing. It is cosplay.

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