When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drove Amazon's "second headquarters" out of New York City, the winner of the much publicized competition to host a multi-billion-dollar office project with many thousands of high-paying jobs was Arlington, Virginia, right across the river from Washington, D.C., where Amazon's founder owns the local fishwrap, the Washington Post.

In return, Amazon planned to build a showy complex of buildings on a riverside plot of land that should be visible from many of the hottest tourist sites in the nation's capital.

As usually is the case with expensive and showy real estate projects, glossy renderings of what the 2.8 million square feet of office towers (about the size of the Empire State Building) would look like were produced.  There would be open green space:

Areas for shopping and cafés:

But the star of the project, the signature building, was to be a spiral tower, complete with green spaces on the spiral!

(All three renderings courtesy of Amazon, via The New York Post.)

Architecture, like all the arts, is prone to fads and imitations.  Wikipedia lists 32 "twisted" skyscrapers in the world today, every single one of them overseas.  The only one that I have seen in person is the F&F Tower in Panama City.  Here is a picture of it that I took a couple of years ago:

Like Amazon’s building, it stands out from the other towers — in a city full of skyscrapers (and many hovels) — and grabs the eye.

But there is one little problem for Bezos and his showplace structure — one that was noticed by a Reddit poster who calls himself "beepthepolak":

New Amazon HQ2 "Helix" Tower...can't unsee this now from r/nova

He's right: you can't unsee this once it is pointed out.

So… does the man made richer by the internet than any other tech mogul surrender to the power of emojis and change the design of his signature building?

Or do he and his company grin and bear it, as the structure becomes known worldwide as "The Poop Emoji Tower"?