| | Steve:
I don't care for the original article's supercilious tone, either. Yet I'm gathering a tone from O-types — here and elsewhere — that to be at all critical of this particular building, or of what caused it to be built, is supposedly an act of denigrating all such architectural achievement. And that, to borrow from Gershwin, ain't necessarily so.
I can't speak for O-types here and elsewhere, but I think Ted's identifying this article as having been written in the tone of an Ellsworth Toohey was precisely accurate. The article in question went beyond criticising this particular building, and in fact explicitely denigrated similar architectural achievement, and implicitely achievement in general, with an undeniably sneering contempt of achievement that could have been copied verbatim from Rand's characterization of Toohey in The Fountainhead.
But I think you are right, that it is possible to also criticise the particulars of the building as being somewhat of a dogs lunch, as if the brilliant ideas of an innovator dead for over a quarter of a century were badly borrowed/copied by an imitator. As if, a Peter Keating had bolted on a gaudy and functionless tower on top of the thing to make a statement making Frankenstein.
regards,
Fred
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