Urban Legend: Architects’ Blunders

Although architects are highly trained professionals whose designs must pass strict standards set by building codes and safety requirements, their work is often characterized in rumors and legends as being flawed, incomplete, unusable, and even dangerous. Sometimes these alleged problems are said to be flaws in the original designs—as when an architect fails to allow for the weight of the books to be stored in a new library. Other problems may be attributed to features of the building site, such as steep ground angles, swampy surroundings, or a forgotten tunnel. In other cases the architect’s plans are satisfactory, but the builders either inadvertently switch plans with another project being built elsewhere or else they read the plans “backward” so the building ends up facing the wrong way.

Possibly some stories about architects’ blunders result from the public’s notion that designers are more interested in making an “artistic” statement or enhancing their own reputations than in designing comfortable settings for human habitation and work. Other stories may stem from people’s sense that some buildings simply “look wrong” and therefore must have been designed or built “wrong” in the first place. Such stories are often told about the designs of the most famous and successful architects, particularly Frank Lloyd Wright, which is perhaps another illustration of the “Goliath effect.”

Undeniably some architects and builders have blundered in some details of the countless buildings that are erected annually, but such mistakes are usually corrected within the terms of the building contracts before—or shortly after—the buildings are put into use. Nevertheless, the rumors and legends adhere to older buildings as well as to new ones, and virtually the same stories are told about buildings in many different places.