Fashion is an industry that suffers from history: within the parameters of producing clothing, pretty much everything has been done before. Sure, designers can create stunning one-off gowns that have more sequins or a puffier skirt or a lower-cut bodice. They can spice up their runway shows by trading traditional fabrics for carbon fiber, recycled rubber, decommissioned dollars and nanotubes. But it's virtually impossible to be truly innovative in a way that filters down to the racks of JCPenney and Wal-mart and into everyman's everyday wardrobe.

Architecture, I think, suffers from much the same problem. Though advances in engineering and materials science do have a continuing effect on how buildings are built, we have general expectations about how a building should function, and there are only so many different facades you can put on a box with floors and windows. You can arrange the windows to let in more natural light, or arrange the rooms so the building is more energy efficient, but it's difficult to come up with a genuinely new concept in architecture. But some do. Like David Fischer, who has designed a morphing skyscraper to be built in Dubai. Innovative? Yes. Technological marvel? Hell yeah. Will it work? I can only remember that the first year of Miller Park was plagued with problems opening and closing the 12000 ton roof. I can only imagine what will happen when they try to independently rotate 80 floors (on wind turbine power). But, the Space Needle has been rotating for years, so maybe they can do it (and maybe this idea isn't as innovative as I had led you to believe).