In a message dated 10/19/98 4:05:16 AM EST, [log in to unmask] writes:

<< administering good design...giving good designers the leeway to
 share the cultural influences of our day, while providing strictures to
 poor designers to prevent them from introducing something "bad" into the
 ensemble.  >>

... than an architect - good or bad - designing an "historic" building.

In the 1970's the architect Kevin Roche designed the most insipid monumental-
modern buildings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which still mar the
Central Park side of the museum (and with a putatively "final" building
episode).  But sadder still is the Roche firms design for an annex to the 1907
Jewish Museum, at 92nd & Fifth, a 1990's "Francois Ier" retro design to break
a longstanding logjam-controversy over development of the site.

The retro design is widely praised by preservation groups - I must be a
killjoy, but I wince every time I pass it, for the lost opportunity it
represents for an architect (and a mason, and a glazier, and other trades) to
design something, whether good or bad, that was not just "compliance
architecture".

Christopher Gray