Heroic architects must be stopped!
From Herbert Muschamp's masturbatory feature on Lower Manhattan in the New York Times Magazine:
Rem Koolhaas's project satirizes New York's nostalgic obsession with the Art Deco skyscraper by turning three of them on their heads. Peter Eisenman's three office towers can be viewed as a formalist exercise, for example, but they are also a critique of the Cartesian grid. The history of ideas is the context for architecture today.
Well, maybe that's why most "groundbreaking" architecture today is so bad. These guys are designing just to secure their place in the canon of Great Architects, with nary a thought for the only context that really matters to good architecture: how people use it. Maya Lin's memorial is the lone bright spot amongst all the rhetoric.
Say what you will about the uninspiring designs of the LMDC, I'd choose dull architecture over architecture run amok every time.
originally posted by Ben Fried