A ponderous article today about 2 Columbus Circle in NYC. It includes a great gratuitous jab at Philly: "I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station was a dismal piece of architecture. A late arrival in the City Beautiful movement, the building tried to augment meager conviction with extreme colonnades. Walking into its cold, cavernous spaces was like arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to."

(from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/ar...gn/08musc.html )

Nice. Sixth borough, my ass.

I love philadelphia and I hate NewYork. I can give a ratsass what anybody in newyork thinks.

You found a new phrase to use? I'm impressed.

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Anybody who diss's the "old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station" is going to have zero credibility and be dismissed as a nut. In fact the description "relentlessly mourned" for that demolished building is the understatement of the century. I'm not old enough to remember it but as a former NYer I know it is probably the most reveared demolished building in the history of the city.

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Forget it Jake……It’s CHINATOWN!

The demolition of NY's Penn Station was the primary impetus for the historic preservation movement. BTW, I've mentioned it in other threads, but 4 of the 40-some stone eagles rescued from that Penn Station now grace the Market St bridge here.

Inga Saffron wrote about Muschamp's NYT piece in her blog Saturday:

[SNIP]

http://changingskyline.blogspot.com/...s-back_07.html

It's sad that it appears too late to stop the extreme makeover of the iconic 2 Columbus Circle "lollipop building."

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Cheers,
Jayfar
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“I am indeed well aware of the history of Conventional (sic) Hall, both globally and locally, and can assure you that we are carefully exploring avenues for its future.” -- Penn President Amy Gutmann 5 days before demolition began.

Omnivore I applaud you for making it to page 2 of that ridiculously convoluted article to see the Philadelphia reference. I felt constipated after reading one paragraph of that mess.

It cracks me up that inga has the balls to criticize an architecture critic. I'm no fan of Muschamp either, but she is without a doubt the least qualified to tell him how to do his job. she asks what good is it to be a critic without advocating anything? well, a critic doesn't have to advocate anything specific, just good architecture. if she has some other agenda, then she is trying to be something other than an architecture critic, and her criticisms are tainted. She should concentrate on trying to be a good critic, which she is not.
And I wish she would dump that "we" from her style when she just means herself. I don't remember authorizing her to speak for me. In fact, I wish she would just shut the hell up altogether.

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On the west coast, people love baseball the way they love their children.
In the midwest, people love baseball the way they love their spouse.
On the east coast, people love baseball the way they love their God.

It would be interesting to see how many other people share your opinion of Inga. A lot of people seem to either really love her or hate her. I really don't understand how anything she says can be all that offensive. I probably agree with about 3/4 of what she says. If anything, I don't find her to be controversial enough in her statements. Interestingly, I often find that the people who disagree with her the most are more pro-developer than pro-architect. But, as a critic, its not her job to be everyone's friend.

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- George -

http://www.barackobama.com

I am not interested in her friendship. I blame the Inquirer for hiring an architecture critic who has no background in architecture. She has admitted this. My problem is not that she is controversial, because she couldn't write anything controversial; she would have to know what she is talking about to write anything controversial.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an architect, so I am both pro-development (they are my clients) and pro-architecture. They are not mutually exclusive.
The most cowardly thing I ever read of hers was in the Sunday Inquirer, right after September 11, she wrote something to the effect that "Our love of skyscrapers and everything they stand for came crashing down with those buildings." First, she used that irritating "our" to mean just hers, but second, she says that she doesn't love skyscrapers or anything they stand for anymore because the WTC was destroyed. She should go join Al Qaeda with that attitude. Before she wrote that, I just used to think of her as a benign idiot, but that kind of journalism is just irresponsible, and I cannot read her column anymore without thinking of that. The rest of the country and the world was chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" right after those attacks, and she comes out with that crap. I wonder what her agenda was in writing that? She and I have exchanged emails, and in one she told me that she prefers to set her own agenda. Again, if her agenda is anything other than just good architecture, then she is not credible (which she isn't anyway.) If, by agenda, she means she picks and chooses what buildings to write about, then fine, but her larger agenda is what makes me despise her column.

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On the west coast, people love baseball the way they love their children.
In the midwest, people love baseball the way they love their spouse.
On the east coast, people love baseball the way they love their God.

Isn't her background in caviar?

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fotographia