Architectural Tastelessness?

I’ve been reading over the last week about the outrage caused by this image from MVRDV in their series of visualisations of their building, The Cloud. There have been a series of articles written by various websites and blogs and the story has appeared on the BBC in the last week as well. People are calling the Korean company insensitive because of the buildings resemblance to the attack on the world trade centre on September 11th but the firm maintains it didn’t recognise anything of the sort during the design stage of the project. I can easily see how that is possible as when I saw the comments about it I was slightly shocked myself. For me it was a fantastic and interesting design, drawing heavily from work by Arata Isozaki in the 60s (below) but this case is interesting because for once an architects is drawn up for being unconsciously offensive rather than trying desperately to evoke some strong reaction from their design, which is the norm. We see so many designers trying to make a name for themselves with increasingly outlandish and hideos designs its a shame that such an intriguing project should be blacklisted by so many people although I fully understand that I may feel differently if I were a New Yorker. This just proves how mindful of others you have to be when you’re on such a public stage.