Renzo Piano's Hulking Glass Sphere Wins 'Darth Vader Award'

Italian starchitect Renzo Piano has been fielding criticism all year for his Academy Museum of Motion Pictures project in Los Angeles, which will add a giant glass sphere to an old mall. The latest and greatest round, though, comes in the form of a glorious "Darth Vader Award," bestowed by Westside Urban Forum, a local group that focuses on land use issues and hosts an irreverent "Oscars, but for land use" award show each year. The honor is dramatically celebrated in the above montage created by the Architect's Newspaper, though it should be noted that the same award was also given to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, whose planned expansion for the L.A. County Museum of Art has also been contentiously debated for quite a while now. [Architect's Newspaper]