I once saw the head office of an airline in Latin America that was shaped like an airliner. This architectural mimesis, or equivalent of onomatopoeia, seemed to me cheap, vulgar, and ridiculous, a kind of symbolism for the irreducibly literal-minded.

The Havenhuis in Antwerp, the headquarters of the Antwerp dock authority, is shaped like a cruise ship and perches, by means of concrete supports, atop an early-twentieth-century copy of a stone-walled Hanseatic building. Its glass facets are diamond-shaped, to suggest Antwerp’s other great trade, diamonds: four-fifths of the world’s supply passes through Antwerp.

I fully confess that I started with a strong prejudice against the Havenhuis. From pictures I had seen, it struck me as the very acme of modern celebrity architecture. Indeed, the open space in front of it is now named after the architect, Zaha Hadid, who died just before the building was inaugurated. The modern part of it is not so much an addition to the old (which in fact had been the city’s fire headquarters before being chosen as the new site of the port authority) as its conqueror, subduing it as a successful wrestler subdues his opponent. Preponderance and prepotency are the main desiderata of the productions of celebrity architects, and the Havenhuis certainly achieves these ends. The architect seems to have paid little attention to the aesthetic compatibility or harmony between the old and the new, or if she has done so it is in the reverse fashion from that