Does Nicolai Ouroussoff understand that a city is more than just a skyline?

This was my stream of consciousness as I read New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s staggeringly obnoxious review of the new Frank Gehry tower in Lower Manhattan (I like the building, by the way. Ouroussoff, on the other hand, may very well be the most clueless high-profile journalist currently writing about cities) Nicolai’s text is in block quotes:

A more recent foray, the massive Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, drew the ire of local activists, who depicted him as an aging liberal in bed with the devil — a New York City real estate developer.

Um, yeah, right. Those uppity Brooklyn activists were merely angry that a “liberal” architect was working with a wealthy real estate developer. Thanks, Nicolai, for taking a complex and principled six-year battle over eminent domain, public investment and the nature of urban planning in New York City and boiling it down to an after-school special story line.

it seemed to epitomize the skyline’s transformation from a symbol of American commerce to a display of individual wealth.

Yay?… Oh, wait, he’s just reporting. Good observation, Nick!

Only now, as the building nears completion, is it possible to appreciate what Mr. Gehry has accomplished: the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen’s CBS building went up 46 years ago.

Oh, no, wait. The successful display of individual wealth is exactly what Ouroussoff thinks is great.

Mr. Gehry’s design is least successful at the bottom, where he was forced to plant his tower on top of a six-story base that will house a new public grammar school and one floor of hospital services — an odd coupling of private and public interests that was a result of political horse trading rather than any obvious benefit that would be gained from so close a relationship between the two.

Indeed! How odd that anyone in Lower Manhattan would want or need a school or hospital? What could possibly be the benefit? How strange that the communities around this 76-story, 900-unit luxury condo would ask for public education and health services as part of a multi-billion dollar deal in their neighborhood.

(Mr. Gehry did not design the interiors of the school, which is still under construction, and students may ask why the pampered young professionals living above them get to live in apartments designed by an architectural superstar while they will have to make do with a no-name talent.)

Because no child should be left behind to go to school in a building designed by a “no-name talent.”

Not surprisingly, the two groups won’t be mixing. Residents will enter through a covered drive that cuts through the block along the building’s western side. Framed by massive brick pillars and a glass-enclosed lobby, the space’s generous proportions will accommodate taxis and limousines ferrying people in and out of the building, making it feel more like a luxury hotel than a classic Manhattan apartment building.

This is a good thing?

None of this matters much, however, once you see the tower in the skyline…

See, to Nicolai Ourossoff, the way a building looks is much more important than the way it integrates with a community, relates to the neighborhood, impacts a city’s transportation system, quality of life and long-term sustainability. According to Nick, “None of this matters” as long as the building looks interesting on a postcard view of the skyline.

In daylight the furrowed surfaces of the facades look as if they’ve been etched by rivulets of water, an effect that is all the more dramatic next to the clunky 1980s glass towers just to the south. Closer up, from City Hall Park, the same ripples look softer, like crumpled fabric.

Ooooohhhhhhh!!!! Crumpled fabric! Fabulousss!

(The flat south facade is comparatively conventional, and some may find perverse enjoyment in the fact that the building presents its backside to Wall Street.)

How perverse! A luxury condo dormitory filled with Wall Street executives that “presents its backside to Wall Street.”

The power of the design only deepens when it is looked at in relation to Gilbert’s Woolworth building. A steel frame building clad in neo-Gothic terra-cotta panels, Gilbert’s masterpiece is a triumphant marriage between the technological innovations that gave rise to the skyscraper and the handcrafted ethos of an earlier era.

And yet the power of Gehry’s crumply fabric design (and Ourousoff’s staggeringly limited criteria for evaluating new buildings) is pretty shallow when you consider 75% of New York City’s carbon emissions come from the energy used in buildings. So, while it’s neat that Gehry is using his technological prowess to make crumply fabric building skin, let’s be clear that this building is fundamentally a 20th century statement. An exemplary 21st century building uses technology not only to create a pretty skin, but to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprint, and help to create a healthy, functional, sustainable public realm outside of the building. A critic in Ourossoff’s position has the ability to push architects in that direction. Instead, he chooses to judge a building on a skin-deep level and as skyline eye-candy.

He aims, as he has throughout his career, to replace the anonymity of the assembly line with an architecture that can convey the infinite variety of urban life. The computer, in his mind, is just a tool for reasserting that variety.

Gehry is totally punk — not corporate at all.

His interest lies in the clashing voices that give cities their meaning; it is democratic at heart.

8 Spruce Street will, no doubt, be an outstanding example of the great multicultural democratic melting pot that is the 21st century Lower Manhattan luxury condo. It’s a beautiful vision: Hedge fund managers crammed into elevators with investment bankers, sharing sweaty gym equipment with finance executives, waiting shoulder-to-shoulder in the car-port with J.P. Morgan managing directors. Eight Spruce Street is nothing less than a gigantic, crumply, silver Great American Melting Pot. It’s what the Lower East Side has always been all about.