"pretentious design" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It refers to something that is designed in a way that is intended to impress or show off, often with an exaggerated or excessive aesthetic. Example: The new luxury hotel boasted a pretentious design, with gold-plated fixtures and marble floors throughout the lobby.
But most of the work is visually spare-to-barely-there, and the pretentious exhibition design introduced at this point — tall, beetling dark-painted partition walls facing out into the ramp — squashes it.
("Potemkin village" came to denote any pretentious facade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition). Joseph II of Austria had already made him a prince of the Holy Roman Empire (1776); Catherine made him prince of Tauris in 1783.
What you now have is all these grotesque creatures appearing randomly and arbitrarily, all of them snarling and plotting and cursing, earnestly reciting pretentious speeches designed to convince the audience that the outlandishly concocted story lines being presented to us actually make sense.
To say that Mr. Jaffe's career was checkered is not to belittle his achievements, but rather to acknowledge that his successes -- the buildings in harmony with their settings, those that are both functional and sculptural -- are counterbalanced by pretentious trophy houses designed for the rich and tasteless.
But Louis Oliver Gropp, the former editor of House Beautiful, maintains that Thompson "made design less pretentious and more possible for more people" -- an almost letter-perfect translation of the mission statement of the Bauhaus.
The worst designs are pretentious: ones that are decorative and ornate but don't fit the performance.
He belittles the architectural work he did for Hitler, mocking the designs as "pretentious," but what remains astonishingly true is that he believed in Hitler's architectural jingoism.
For a balance of verbal and visual matter similar to that which Niffenegger employs one only has to turn to the generous hoard of children's books in any bookshop, where exciting and inventive combinations of image and story less pretentious and, moreover, specifically designed for commercial publication, abound.
The funny throat noise may have also come from the fact that, for many, the term "design art" means pretentious and opportunistic.
Granted, the "Matrix" movies are designed to be pretentious, with all those dopey names like Morpheus and Trinity (and how about, for future films, Piety, or Eucharist, or Pompous?).
