From the Fundación Arquia Blog, architect José Ramón Hernandez brings us an article that reflects on projects that can only be appreciated because of who they were created by. If it weren't for the fact that they bear the signature of their illustrious creator, they most likely would have gone completely unnoticed or even despised.

Port offices of Antwerp, Zaha Hadid Architects, 2016. Image © Helene Binet

From the Fundación Arquia Blog, architect José Ramón Hernandez brings us an article that reflects on projects that can only be appreciated because of who they were created by. If it weren't for the fact that they bear the signature of their illustrious creator, they most likely would have gone completely unnoticed or even despised.The French writer Claude Simon, one of the fathers of the nouveau roman, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985 for his novels "that combine the creativity of the poet and the painter in giving profound testimony to the complexity of the human condition". As a bet, a great admirer of his, Serge Volle, sent fifty pages of a novel written by Simon—Le Palace (1962)—to twenty publishers without telling them that the text was actually from the Nobel laureate. He received twenty rejections; no one wanted to publish the work. Some of these rejections were without justification, whereas others said that the s...