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.