The underlying Great Question joke is the conundrum articulated by the "Barber paradox" in pure logic.
"We wanted a pavilion that was architecture in a very pure archaic way, that would be a paradox, but as pure and objective as possible," he says.
However, Kant's claim is that the paradoxes diagnosed in the "Antinomy of Pure Reason" can only be resolved on the basis of transcendental idealism.
It's the Jack White paradox: a musician rails that the press highlights trivialities rather than their pure art, while wholly aware that their comments perpetuate the gossip cycle, cultivate their persona and probably don't hurt sales.
It's a paradox, and a fun one: their artifice destroyed, starry blockbusters like this can actually drift towards "pure cinema", the avant-garde impulse to emphasise the formal techniques of film – editing, sound, photography – above narrative.
Beginning with the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Peter Eisenman, postmodern architects deliberately rejected the pure forms and "truth to materials" of the modern architect and put in their place irony, ornament, historical reference, and deliberate paradox.
