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The Kinks, the Cotswolds and the Next World Trade Center

This is Bourton-on-the-Water, a tiny idyll in the English Cotswolds. It's my friend Michael's favorite spot in the
whole world.

To understand why, it helps to know that Michael is a latter-day, non-Tory — i.e., altogether more complex and interesting — incarnation of the Englishman most of us non-Brits have in mind when we hear that Gilbert and Sullivan song: a tweeds-and-cravat-wearing gentleman scholar who — although he wasn’t born until 1960 — still can't completely forgive the Germans; still can work himself into a righteous tether over the decline and fall of old English carmakers like Rover, Morris, MG and Triumph; and is never happier than when he's ambling around a place very much like the Leicestershire market town he grew up in.

Which is to say, a place very much like Bourton-on-the-Water.

Michael introduced Bourton to me sometime in the late 1980s, when we were students together at St. Andrews University in Scotland. That was around the time he also introduced me to The Kinks by playing me their classic 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

It turns out that the early prophets of the British Invasion and the quintessential hamlet of the English Midlands hold some of the most important lessons for ground zero, which I'll come to shortly. The convergence couldn't have been more fitting, even then.

The Taming of Nicolai

Here in New York, people — well, some people — are worried about Norman Foster's design for 30 stories of residential glass at 980 Madison Avenue.

As you might guess, "community" types
in the Upper East Side neighborhood — the ones who, if it were up to them, would always build in such
a way as to preserve this entire precinct of the City in historically reenacted amber ("If build you must, build it like they did before the war. Twelve stories or less. And no glass, please.") — are nervous that Foster's tower will get built.

The contemporary art crowd is nervous that it won't. Regarding Foster as one of their own, they see in Foster's tower a chance to use his American moment — triggered by the critical and popular success of his recently completed Hearst Tower — to give their traditionally conservative neighborhood an architectural I-V of modern energy.

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff came out early with a 10 October preview of Foster's design that concluded with the observation that "you cannot help but marvel at the project's sophistication as a work of architecture."

As a work of criticism, Ouroussoff's introduction to 980 Madison was decidedly less effusive, at least on paper, than New Yorker magazine critic Paul Golberger's December 2005 review of Foster's Hearst Tower — a review Goldberger opened by declaring Foster the "Mozart of modernism."

If Goldberger’s review was a French kiss in broad daylight, Ouroussoff’s preview comes off as a somewhat furtive kiss
of the ring.

But this is what makes Ouroussoff’s the more surprising — and troubling — response.