"Until Christian de Portzamparc's LVMH Tower opened last year on East 57th
Street, Manhattan had not seen a serious piece of modern architecture in
years.  In fact, since 1966, the year the Ford Foundation building was
completed, the city has scarcely seen serious architecture of any kind. The
collapse of New York architecture is a direct result of the postmodern
reaction against the International Style....  If New York hadn't lost
confidence in its creative energies, the Rose Center would look  less
startling....  But architecture in New York is an interrupted art.  The Rose
Center interrupts the interruption."

-- Herbert Muschamp, review of the American Museum of Natural History's new
Rose Center for Earth and Space, The New York Times, February 13, 2000.

I concur with this observation, but not necessarily this thesis.  I weep
that, in the last three decades, our buildings have had most of the nerve and
wit ironed out of them.  But there must be some reason beyond (or at least in
addition to) the "postmodern reaction against the International Style".  Have
not other cities, indeed the entire nation, had the same or similar reaction?
   Does our strong preservation law/constituency have some connection?

Christopher Gray