Last night I saw “Inception,” six months after the buzz, but nonetheless excited to lose myself in an elegantly designed movie. But the experience wasn’t visually compelling at all.  The architect in the movie, Ariadne, is a young, hippie-ish woman, which is cool.  But the synthetic worlds that she constructs for her team of dream-invading global super-spies fall flat.  Roads that bend at 90 degrees vertically?  Mirrored Parisian courtyard blocks?  Endlessly looping staircases?  These are adolescent, Escher-like effects.

The one unique design in the film is the Ice Fortress that serves as a backdrop for a captive’s dream.  Its setting reminds me of the snow planet where we find Luke at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back."  But the building itself is a dazzling, over-the-top, brutalist concoction that was modeled after the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego.  That building, by architect William Pereira, was funded by and perhaps also inspired by the work of Theodor Geisel, the writer known as Dr. Seuss.  In turning to this awesome, ridiculous building for inspiration, the movie-makers did something absolutely right.

Long before the House of Balenciaga got hot for its studded, streamered leather handbags and its Space-Age Warrior Princess minidresses, it was reknown for the hyper-elegant creations of its founder, couturier Cristobal Balenciaga.  The exhibit “Balenciaga: Spanish Master” at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute on Park Avenue makes clear how little the image of the current brand has to do with Balenciaga’s inspired, rigorous, dream-like garments.

Balenciaga highlighted a woman’s neck and downplayed everything below with softly sculpted garments that hung away from the body.  His gowns and jackets create shapes that are architecturally structured but still tethered to the body like force fields.  One signature feature is an integral or removable cape, derived from a priest’s or matador’s coat, that masks and embellishes the wearer’s shoulders and arms.  The image of women sliding about in these caped garments, often handless and armless, is striking, surreal and graceful.  The dresses are like gorgeous cocoons.

Right now I’m helping clients install a new washing machine and my parents install a new flat-screen television, so I’m especially attentive to the magical powers of shiny new machines.

Sculptor Danh Vo made this piece, “Oma Totem,” from gifts (television, refrigerator, washing machine) his grandmother received from a Roman Catholic relief agency when she arrived in Germany in the 1980’s from Vietnam.  It’s intentionally soulless, drained of power.  There’s none of the glamor of new machines, the splendor of church iconography, or the drama of Vo’s grandmother’s personal journey.  But the piece captures very nicely how inert appliances really are.  They’re just implements that help us get things done.

I’ve had mixed feelings about Frank Gehry’s IAC Building on Ninth Avenue, his first in the city, since it was completed in 2007.  It’s shape, meant to evoke sails, seemed strangely rigid, and its patterned white glass panels seemed ugly.  During the day it felt willfully eccentric and at night it felt massive and misplaced, like a bright white spaceship.

Then this weekend I passed it and, when viewed against the gray winter sky and clumps of snow, it seemed entirely natural and perfectly placed, like an urban mountain.  Maybe it was the bone-chilling temperature that rattled my point of view.  Or maybe it just took the building a few years to settle in and reveal how it fits into the city.