Sharkitect Week

Fallingwater is a dream for most anybody, an architectural symbol for meditation and calm. The perfect synthesis of the built and natural environments.

And it's all over.

Sharks—whose menacing attacks have exploded so dramatically this week that people are calling it "Shark Week"—have taken over Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic structure. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy sent along this terrifying documentary photo of a shark making itself right at home in one of Wright's guest-house pools.

ARCHITECT checked in on several other architectural gems around the world. The news is grim: The sharks have won, and they have a nose for progressive architecture.

Just consider the Orange Cube, which graced our May 2011 issue. In his review of the Lyon, France, project, Mark Lamster praised Jakob + MacFarlane's "bravura formal element, an immense conical void that punctures the façade at its northwest corner and extends up through the roof, opening the interior out toward a bend in the river." He might as well've called it a chomp.

Any architect would be lucky to design something so graceful yet idiosyncratic as the hammerhead shark. This is probably cold comfort for Bjarke Ingels, whose design for the Telus Sky Tower in Calgary, Alberta, certainly reflects a hammerhead design.

The 75-story Cayan Tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was dubbed the world's largest twisting tower when it opened in June. Do you know what else is big?

EHDD transformed two tiers on San Francisco's historic waterfront into the reimagined and relocated Exploratorium, one of the city's most treasured museums. In turn, a great white shark transformed the Exploratorium into a snack.

The Star in Singapore features residential towers, a casino, a flying pool, a megachurch, and 260,000 square feet of retail. And yet it was missing one thing. 

When Michelle Dean checked out the Party Wall, designed by Coda for the Museum of Modern Art P.S.1 in Queens, N.Y., she singled out one figure among the partygoers at the summer shindig: "[M]aybe only the rubes look at the structure, rather than gauge the outfits or catch the music or, as one young man appeared to be doing, simply move around the shadows until you have found the best angle to casually observe the women straying close to the mist."

But she only thought she found a predator.

Oh dear.