Returning last week from the Venice Biennale - a good, no-nonsense look at the coming decade in architecture, directed with aplomb by Deyan Sudjic and designed by the minimalist John Pawson, who had to accommodate some huge and weirdly-shaped egos - I thought of setting up the Right Angle Club. A reaction to the rash of frantic architectural shape-making on display, this admittedly tongue-in-cheek virtual organization is dedicated to promoting real rectangular buildings rather than the many types of fancy pastry now being built. The Club provides succour to hard-line modernists and classicists alike, rehabilitation clinics for architects who have found themselves going all squidgy, and generally reminds everyone that - from the Parthenon to the Pompidou Centre - the post, beam and 90 degree corner have served architecture pretty well.

But amusing though the prospect of the Right Angle Club is, I confess it is also plainly absurd. Who would wish to remove from the architectural pantheon such non-orthogonal buildings as Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel in France (arguably the first exercise in architectural deconstruction, completed back in 1954) Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House (1956-73), Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonic concert hall (1956-63), Frank Lloyd Wright's original New York Guggenheim (1942-1960, the prototypical Mr Whippy building), Frank Gehry's Bilbao follow-up of 1997, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw's Eden Project of 2001, the jagged best of Danny Libeskind, Zaha Hadid or America's Peter Eisenman, or the finer curvy buildings of Lord Foster, from the Willis Faber building of 1975 in Ipswich to his new "Swiss Re" building in the City (named after a reinsurance company, and also known officially as 30 St. Mary Axe and unofficially as "the erotic gherkin")? Or the virtuoso Yokohama Port Terminal by British rising stars Foreign Office Architects, an immense building-as-landscape exercise where right angles are studiously avoided and which was the official British entry at the Biennale?