“The blemishes stand up and shout”

Has American architecture entered its era of error?

Consider the two most prominent architectural debuts of the season: the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by Peter Zumthor and SOM, and an addition to the New Museum in New York by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The public and critical reaction to these projects has fixated, to a greater or lesser degree, on the various ways that they’re flawed, imperfect, botched, sloppy, or otherwise imprecise. They seem to herald a new wave of high-profile architecture projects where the gap between aspiration and execution may be giant or relatively narrow but is always noticeable.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. A key element of modern architecture—of modernism more broadly!—was an obsession with precision. In 1928, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously railed against the ceiling of Parkgasse 18 in Vienna, inside a house he’d designed with the Loos disciple Paul Engelmann, because it was out of alignment by 30 millimeters; “I learn that we are precisionists,” the poet Marianne Moore wrote the same decade, in a poem called “Bowls.”