A recognisable building is a PR gift.
Cities everywhere use architectural shorthand—Big Ben for London, the Chrysler Building for New York, the Opera House for Sydney.
The port city of Malmo in Sweden had a symbol of its industrial heritage, a dockside crane, that everyone in the region recognised, but when it was removed, the city was left without any notable landmark.
The question was: would the city lose a sense of its identity?
This dilemma was answered by the Turning Torso tower, a white whirlwind of a building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in 2004, which put Malmo back on the map.
You'll have noticed it in the various Nordic noir television dramas because Malmo sits at the Swedish end of the Oresund bridge that reaches over to Denmark.
The tower is 190 metres tall and each floor twists gently so that the top storey sits at 90 degrees to the bottom level. In the low-rise city, it's a superstar.
Whether you think that makes a great building is another matter.
Calatrava first found fame with bridges, including one for Seville's Expo in 1992. They look like strange musical instruments with their harp-like cables and dramatic white curves.
His buildings are also all about shape, like the opera house in Tenerife that gives more than a nod to the Sydney Opera House, and the recent World Trade Center Transportation Hub in Manhattan that resembles a white dove taking flight.
They're guaranteed to stop you in your tracks.
Of course there are other twisting buildings, like the Cayan Tower in Dubai and the more sinuous Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China.
Twisting a building helps divert the wind away from the sides, which is always a punishing force on a tall building, but even more so for those in exposed places, such as the Oresund Strait.
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The ability to design such buildings is all down to computer technology, but what sets Calatrava apart is that his buildings usually start life as sculptures.
The Turning Torso building was based on one he made in the 1990s. Ot gives his work a hands-on style that is warmer, I think, than those designed purely on the screen.
There's a touch of Romanian artist Brancusi's sinuous sculptures of the 1920s—the bird in space, especially—and a similar emotional response.
Would places like Geelong or Dubbo feel different if they had strikingly shaped buildings which marked them out? If Malmo is anything to go by, I'd say yes, because frankly I can't think of another reason for going to Malmo.
Although put me in a trench coat and give me the keys to a classic Porsche and I might just change my mind.