So it's up to you. Pick 'n' mix: what about the understated cool of the emerging Tate Museum of Modern Art by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, say? How different from the passionate tectonics of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum amid the gigantic reshaping of Berlin. Or take a huge themed shopping mall in California, which is, well, an example of a huge themed shopping mall. A security-guarded golfing resort outside Las Vegas is contrasted with an austerely beautiful worker housing block in Gifu, Japan by a female architect, Kazuyo Sejima. Sir Norman Foster's giant barrel-vaulted Hong Kong Airport is wholly unlike the undulating stratifications of the Yokohama International Port Terminal by the cultishly named Foreign Office Architects. There is that tower in Shanghai, a chisel shape with a hole cut in the top by New York architects Kohn Pedersen Fox. It will be the world's tallest for a while. You can see our very own Millennium Dome, by Lord (Richard) Rogers, a rapid bit of wasteland regeneration. And offering a slower approach, a redundant steel mill in the Ruhr is slowly being "greened" into a kind of urban park.
No, these things have nothing in common. Pushed on this, the show's curator, Rowan Moore, offers "strangeness" as a link, but that won't really do. New architecture has always been strange. Medieval cathedrals were strange. Victorian railway stations were strange. Airship hangars, tower blocks, petrol stations, were all strange. Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral Guggenheim in New York was strange. Today's strange buildings will soon be equally familiar.
In fact, Moore is only being honest. He wants to reflect the diversity of today's large-scale architecture, not cook up some half-baked theory or manifesto that attempts to yoke everything together. Unless you are going to pick out one architectural style, one architect, one building type, or one country, you cannot easily bring order to an ambitious exhibition like this. So instead, the diverse projects are accessibly presented, and we are left to draw our own conclusions.
It may look like a cop-out but it isn't. That's the way things are. That's why it is easy to end up feeling bad about architecture. You find yourself half-wishing that someone was in control, that it wasn't all just a combination of chance, money and vested interests. But so it is. When Lord Rogers, who has a bit of vision about him, designed a Utopian, car-free new district for Shanghai a few years back, the Chinese politely ignored him and slammed in mega-highways instead.
Wright - ever the optimist, twirling his cane - most certainly wanted to be that benign architectural dictator. He designed everything from plates and mugs and chairs, through houses and office blocks and galleries and towers, to entire cities. He knew how things should be. He changed his mind frequently of course, but that didn't stop him being absolutely certain of his own genius. It takes a special kind of confidence - or maybe paranoia - to be able to write, as he did in the early 1930s: "Not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but the greatest who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time."
He was, as it happened, responding to attacks from those who saw him as old-fashioned compared with the new breed of European modernists. Wright (1867-1959) had touchingly similar attitudes to his European rival Le Corbusier (1887-1965) who was equally convinced of his own brilliance, was an equally good self-propagandist, and who now vies with Wright for the title of at least the 20th century's greatest architect. For my money, Wright triumphs over Corb every time. True, he had near-Messianic visions of how he wanted the world to be, and promoted them tirelessly. He was cranky, dandified, at times ludicrous, but luckily also happened to be a genius. All this is equally true of Corb: but he was essentially a classicist, and Wright was a Goth. I am fond of Goths.
The Glasgow exhibition devoted to him - a bought-in show from the Vitra Design Museum in Basel - is single-minded and gloriously uplifting. It is also in a sense easy, since Wright is a gift, a larger than life character. But which would you rather see on a video screen - the white-haired wizard Wright talking about his astonishing career, taken from the archives of 1950s American television, or the design consultant Stephen Bayley reprising his tedious anti-Dome routine? The former may be found at the Wright show, the latter at Vertigo. No contest. True, I think that to live in a wholly Wright-designed world would drive anyone mad. But hell, you can't help admiring the strength of the vision.
