A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky).  At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films.

While the most important thing to note when correcting this sort of critique is, as Trimble says, that the generic quality of the architecture is true to the internal logic of the film (and a dreamlike architecture would not be), the demand for dreamlike architecture is quite consistent with a cultural predilection for evaluating the interest of architecture primarily in terms of its (visual) novelty.  (To me, questions that might arise from the suggested use of predictable architecture as a means for producing psychological comfort seem at least as interesting from an architectural standpoint as any questions that might be provoked by a CGI-enhanced tour of, say, a city populated by the MVRDV and FAT designs that Betsky suggests.  Which not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy the latter — I would — but that an architectural imagination which finds only the latter interesting seems very limited.)

Also pleasurable and speaking of Fashion Architecture Taste: Charles Holland on Inception: “It would be far better if the film had no ending at all and instead just carried on and on indefinitely until people finally grew bored and left the cinema”.