As Simon Sadler documents in Archigram, the first book-length survey of the design collective of the same name, in few areas did the postwar fever for American modernist culture manifest itself more than in architecture. Like the rest of Europe, Britain had spent a generation literally rebuilding itself, largely along the coldly rational lines set out by the modernists in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But by the late 1950’s, British architecture had reached a crisis point. For much of the 20th century it had sat well behind the leading edge, producing few innovators and mostly aping what came out of France, Germany and Italy. In the immediate postwar years, this meant taking Le Corbusier’s notion of modern architecture as a “machine for living” literally: Apartment blocks that would’ve been at home in Moscow or Warsaw sprang up in Manchester and Birmingham—a roof overhead, but one made of bare concrete. And so, with their society’s material needs met, young architects of the late 1950’s began to ask, along with their artist counterparts: Is this it? Is banality the ultimate reward for economic development?

The answer on both sides of the Atlantic came in the flowering of pop-influenced art movements during the early 1960’s, with Archigram, a loose affiliation of rebellious British architects, as its architectural component. Modern society, Archigram argued, shouldn’t simply be about efficiency, but about the freedom and pleasure efficiency affords.

One thinks of the New York art scene, the electric guitar, Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes—anything and everything that embraced popular culture as a means of pushing modernity to its limits. America was already well along this path; the challenge for Archigram and others was to reconstitute its cultural DNA to fit British sensibilities. As Mr. Sadler writes, “Connecting with a new culture of beat literature, angry young men, abstract expressionism, and existentialism, this reverie counterbalanced the policy-making positivism that confined inquiry in schools and offices in the early sixties to narrowly defined research programs.” The future was imminent, and it was New York City.

Archigram was best known for several exhibits and its sporadic but highly popular, eponymous magazine; the collective didn’t open an office until 1970, and even then completed only a few minor projects. Instead, like the Soviet Constructivists of the 1920’s, the members of Archigram were less interested in building than in thinking, in exploring the potential that the changing cultural and technical landscape afforded. Archigram’s first show, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1963, broke new conceptual ground by arguing, through magazine collages and fantastical architectural images, that the city was defined not by its physical structures but by the ever-changing flow of life within it—and that, as a result, architecture should move toward forms that could readily adapt to the needs of modern man. Plastic buildings, walking cities, mobile homes that plug into urban grids—all of these ideas sprang from Archigram’s insistence that the promise of modern architecture couldn’t be fully realized until architects made form subservient to desire.

The keys to unlocking this potential, Archigram believed, could already be found in American culture. Going beyond the superficial embrace of American products, Archigram lauded the seemingly unlimited potential for movement within American society. With its car culture and newly announced national highway system, with its burgeoning skyscrapers and suburban idylls, America seemed the place where modern technology had finally merged physical and social freedom. Such was their faith in America that, as late as 1970, the members of Archigram could still write: “It is no accident … that so many Europeans (such as contributors to this Archigram) have been inspired by the experience of the United States. It is still a place where things are done—not just talked about.”

But faith in modernism’s potential began to wilt as the 1960’s progressed. Vietnam, Third World liberation movements, emerging environmental consciousness and the sprouting of alternative lifestyles called into question the idea that technologically driven growth was necessarily a good thing.

Mr. Sadler’s writing isn’t always as clear as it could be—the book follows themes rather than chronology, and readers may easily lose track of key figures and dates—but he’s lucid where it counts, particularly in his final judgments of the movement and, in general, the optimism of early 1960’s culture. He suggests that the root of the postmodern reaction was a sort of cultural nausea, brought on by the breakneck speed at which modernism was dissolving tradition, place and cultural boundaries. Such a reaction cut to the core of Archigram’s belief that architectural form and the tight bond between place and architecture needed to be erased. “By dissolving place into a nexus of servicing points joined by free-roving human receptors, it too threatened to dissolve place,” Mr. Sadler writes. “Archigram sought the solution to modernism’s shortcoming in making modernism more extreme; the appetite, postmodernists were discovering, was for the opposite.”

But if Archigram’s moment quickly passed, its shadow remained. In a way, it closely paralleled another product of the pop-culture 60’s, the Velvet Underground: The band’s actual output was minimal, but its influence was enormous. Many of the architectural movements to emerge since the early 1970’s can be traced back to Archigram, some directly through students and colleagues. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Center in Paris, with its colorful inside-out piping, is perhaps the most famous Archigram-inspired structure, but the work of everyone from Sir Norman Foster to Zaha Hadid to Rem Koolhaas is unthinkable without its precedent. And if recent interest in the group is any indication (a major retrospective last year at London’s Design Museum, for example), the lessons of Archigram are not yet wholly forgotten. While many of the collective’s fantastical plans are clearly of a time and place, its underlying belief that buildings and cities must serve the people who inhabit them is something that today’s architects forget at their peril.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

There are few topics as fascinating or, in their potential to devour readers whole, as dangerous as this city's underground. Most American towns barely have one to speak of-who cares what's under Phoenix? New York's underground is different: The history, geography, politics and sheer size of its subterranean environs have given rise to a library's worth of books in a panoply of fields, all devoted to the single question of what lies beneath the city's streets.

Some of the more noteworthy titles include Unearthing Gotham (2001), the definitive text on New York's urban archaeology; 722 Miles (1993), Clifton Hood's classic history of the city's subway system; Jennifer Toth's The Mole People (1993), a look at people who live in abandoned rail and service tunnels; and Underneath New York, Harry Granick's 1947 ur-text for all things subterranean. And 2004-the subway's centenary-saw a mini-boom in underground New York titles, including Subway Style, The City Beneath Us and A Century of Subways.

All this literary spelunking has its extratextual analogue in an army of loosely affiliated urban-exploration "clubs." Kevin Walsh, a copywriter who moonlights at forgotten-ny.com, leads occasional (but well-attended) tours through the city's lesser-known corners. Dark Passage does the same, though with an eye toward riskier, more illicit destinations. Jinx magazine hosts explorer message boards. And Ars Subterranea organizes underground art exhibits (literally): In late 2002, it held a one-day show in the abandoned, long-forgotten Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn.

As one might expect, the world of New York underground aficionados is anarchic and wildly disparate. But if anyone can claim doyenne-ship over the scene, it's Julia Solis. Founder of both Dark Passage and Ars Subterranea and a 15-year veteran of the city's urban-exploration scene, Ms. Solis can likely claim to have seen more of New York's innards than anyone, save perhaps a few longtime employees of Con Ed or the M.T.A. Now Ms. Solis has added her own contribution to the subterranean library, a coffee-table tome appropriately titled New York Underground.

In her introduction, Ms. Solis writes that New York Underground "is intended as a fairly comprehensive overview of what lies below our streets." Given the vast amount of academic and popular scholarship, the sheer wealth of material, Ms. Solis' aim seems unnecessarily ambitious and, given the book's mere 226 pages of text (interspersed with lots of pictures), unachievable as well. But Ms. Solis means it-she spends the bulk of the book on a whirlwind tour through the history of everything from the city's enormous water tunnels to the system of pneumatic mail tubes that serviced downtown buildings during the early 20th century. Too much of this is merely retread: Her coverage of the subway is all but copied from Clifton Hood, and anyone wanting a history of the New York water system would do better to dig up David Grann's phenomenal article "City of Water," which ran in The New Yorker last summer.

That said, New York Underground is still a good book, saved by both Ms. Solis' stunning photography and her occasionally brilliant observations culled from her expeditions below ground. Julia Solis, the photographer, has an Old Master's eye for the telling detail, and though her pictures appear in black and white throughout the book, she saves the best for four full-color, eight-page spreads. The first spread-which could be titled A Study in Rust-focuses largely on the Croton Aqueduct, a 19th-century engineering marvel which brought fresh water to the city from upstate. One image from the set, taken in the pipe that spans the Harlem River, is almost abstract in its composition; the light emanates not from a camera flash or the other end of the tunnel, but from the myriad cracks where the pipe has rusted through, casting a complex and subtle glow on the lengthy expanse.

Another photograph, taken in the subway warrens beneath City Hall soon after Sept. 11, shows a long, square tunnel with a laid-up train at the other end; in between lies a long, thin pool of water covered in the dust that blew through when the Trade Center towers collapsed. It's a hauntingly beautiful picture, and a wholly fresh image of the World's Most Photographed Event.

Because so much of Ms. Solis' text merely glosses over what others have already said (and not as well or as thoroughly, either), her moments of insight are all the more impressive. She informs us, for example, that the orange-tiled Lexington Avenue F Train station, in which the east- and west-bound tubes are stacked on top of each other, has an empty doppelgänger station directly adjacent. "Walking in this unused area," she writes, "it is possible to hear the voices of the subway passengers on the other side of the wall." Or this, from the bowels of an abandoned hospital in Staten Island: "One of the windowless rooms had a dirty mattress on the floor and gave the impression that someone had resided there. Inside a flooded closet, on top of discolored debris, floated the arm of a plastic doll."

It's to Ms. Solis' great credit that, despite the eeriness evoked by such images, she doesn't play up the underground's fright factor. She feels, on the contrary, that "the hidden areas beneath the streets can be strangely peaceful and welcoming. It's specifically in its subterranean realms that this often chaotic metropolis becomes approachable; the secret spaces of the underground, desolate and beautiful, are the intimate surfaces of this gargantuan city." Sentences like these make one wish for a slightly different book. Indeed, had Ms. Solis' self-appointed mission been to interpret rather than to catalog the city's underground, she might have produced a classic. Let's hope someday she does.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating account of the slow demise of legacy airlines, in particular US Airways. Legacy carriers—so called because they are the legacy of the pre-deregulation era, when the government set air routes and ticket prices—once enjoyed the corporate world’s version of the luxe life (an array of government regulations made it difficult for new companies to enter the market), but since President Jimmy Carter opened the industry in 1978, they’ve had to fight a losing battle against upstart, no-frills carriers like Southwest and JetBlue. In the early 1990’s, Pan Am and Eastern called it quits; in the next few years, it’s likely that US Airways or some other financially pressed airline will do the same.

The demise of the legacy carriers is about more than just airline economics. As Alastair Gordon makes clear in his breezy, engaging new book, Naked Airport, their passing is also the final step in a vast but unappreciated cultural dialectic. Since its inception in the early 1920’s, commercial air travel, and the structures that facilitate it, have been defined by two opposing forces: on the one hand, the glamour and adventure that come with slipping the bonds of earth and distance; on the other, the need to regiment and systematize a form of mass transit.

Mr. Gordon embodies this tension in the persons of Henry Ford and Juan Trippe, founder and president of Pan Am. Ford is, of course, best known for his car manufacturing. But up until the late 1930’s, the Ford Trimotor was one of the most popular commercial aircraft; Ford also built the Dearborn airport and promoted airport construction across the country. The auto magnate understandably saw air travel as little different from automobiles or trains, and he believed that the same principles of low cost and mass availability through process regimentation could be applied.

Trippe saw things in radically different terms. The product of Long Island wealth and a Yale education, he founded Pan American Airways in 1927 on the notion that air travel was a way to escape the everyday, an adventure rather than a means of transportation. He built a network of airports throughout Latin America, with his luxurious Miami facility (later Miami International Airport) as its hub. Travelers would whisk off to Havana (a favorite destination for the wealthy during Prohibition) and beyond, where, as one of Trippe’s associates reported, "People would come to see the airplane, and there would be a lot of flag waving. We were often invited in for cocktails at the hotel by high government officials." But Trippe’s Pan Am was merely the apotheosis of the prevailing image of air travel before World War II—though not as comfortable as an ocean liner or a train, an airplane flight signaled wealth and sophistication, a way for the moneyed classes on the coasts to move about the country and the world. As Cecilia Brady, the college student in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, comments, "In the big transcontinental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America."

But deep within Trippe’s vision was the seed of its own destruction. The luxury of air travel drove its popularity. But as the volume of travelers increased, the shine wore off, a change that Mr. Gordon ingeniously traces through the development of airport architecture. The first airports were modeled on country clubs and classical temples (not only to make them classy, but also to ease first-time travelers’ anxieties); to 21st-century eyes, they look more like small-town railroad stations than anything air-related. But these early structures proved unable to handle the press of thousands of travelers who descended on the industry following World War II. Luxury gave way to process. Aesthetics gave way to traffic-pattern studies as the overriding design concern. Indeed, many of the first high-volume airports put into service in the late 1940’s were converted factories and warehouses.

Nonetheless, the luxe vision was far from dead. Trippe may have had elite notions, but he didn’t see air travel as an exclusive preserve of the elite. Rather, he wanted to bring luxury to everyone: In 1954, he instituted a "fly now, pay later" credit plan to help more people afford tickets. It worked. The postwar decades were the golden age of air travel. In 1945, 6.7 million people flew in the United States. The next year, that number had shot to 12.5 million; by 1956, it was 40 million. And they flew not on cramped, noisy prop planes but on enormous jets. State-of-the-art new airports, such as Minoru Yamasaki’s Lambert Field in St. Louis and Eero Saarinen’s Dulles International outside Washington, sprung up to handle the crush of passengers and the technical requirements of their jet transports. "Jet" became the it word of the day: jet set, The Jetsons, the New York Jets. Pulp novels and films centered around the allure of heroic pilots and comely stewardesses. Coffee, Tea or Me, billed as "the uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses," was a bestseller in 1967. It seemed, for a moment, that Ford and Trippe’s competing visions had been reconciled.

As with so much of American culture in the 1960’s, the moment passed quickly. The technology that people at first fetishized became part of the humdrum. Moreover, the downside quickly became apparent: pollution, accidents, the routinization of our daily lives. In airports, moving sidewalks and anonymous boarding lounges came to define the air-travel experience, along with delays, long lines and sterile airport air. "Encapsulation is a good part of the price paid for speed," the critic George Nelson wrote.

By the 1970’s, a new problem had emerged. Terrorists and other criminals realized that an airplane isn’t just an efficient way to move hundreds of people around the world—it’s also an efficient way to take hundreds of hostages. As Mr. Gordon notes, "Between 1969 and 1978, there were more than four hundred international hijackings involving over seventy-five thousand passengers." In response, countries turned airports into highly defended security zones, funneling passengers through X-ray chutes and subjecting them and their luggage to dehumanizing searches. To be sure, the turn to security has been worth it: Hijackings these days are rare, and even counting 9/11, a person’s chances of being involved in a violent event in the air are much lower now than they were 30 years ago. But the price has been to replace luxury with security as the defining characteristic of air travel.

As the Journal article makes clear, the rise of no-frills, low-cost airlines is the latest step in the Fordist routinization of the airport. As the glamour and individualism of air travel gave way to the efficiencies of mass transit, it was inevitable that companies still tied to the glory days should pass as well. Now it seems that no one looks forward to going to the airport, much less taking a flight. If nothing else, Naked Airport is a pleasant reminder that once, people did.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

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The joke about Phaidon’s new Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture is that, at 809 pages and 16 pounds, it’s less a coffee-table book than a coffee table. But every ounce is justified, as Phaidon’s editors have assembled a beautiful, thorough overview of more than 1,000 buildings that went up around the world between 1998 and 2003. Though they might have a hard time making it fit, serious architecture fans should be required to make space for the Atlas on their bookshelves.

Organized geographically—by region, country and continent, cross-listed by architect—the book will surely give the lie to anyone who thinks there’s nothing happening in the world of architecture outside of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. Alongside the "starchitects," we discover a surprising number of works by obscure architects hired by all kinds of clients: a $3,000 tree house in Ethiopia; a psychologist’s office in Jordan; a $20,000 cabin in New South Wales, Australia. The front of the book includes lengthy charts on population and urbanization trends for each country featured. The range of styles and locations—indeed, the sheer amount of information—can be overwhelming at times. But for all its encyclopedic tendencies, the book is a subtle yet cogent argument about the direction of world architecture: Today’s modernism is global in reach yet local in perspective, conforming to its surrounding aesthetics yet expressing a universal order.

During modernism’s first heyday around the middle of the 20th century, speaking of "world architecture" in any substantive sense was a close-to-impossible task. To be sure, architecture existed outside of Eurocentric modernism, but few people took notice, let alone attempted to incorporate it into their work. There were some, like Louis Kahn in Dacca, Bangladesh, or Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India, who took seriously the idea of melding modernist ideas and local aesthetics when designing public structures (though even Le Corbusier failed at that in his city plan for Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab province, as he imposed a garden-city-inspired grid onto the Indian landscape).

Modernist architecture fell into disfavor during the 1970’s and 1980’s, as critics and practitioners—like the rest of the intellectual world—called into question "Eurocentric" notions of progress and order. But their solution, postmodern pastiche—which often meant little more than whimsical incorporation of traditional design elements or corporate kitsch—failed to present a compelling alternative, and by the 1990’s modernism was on the upswing again, though this time more sensitive to the varieties of cultural experience, and to the need for human scale to balance out the urge toward an eminently rational but at times overbearing universal aesthetic. Such an urge was facilitated by the explosion in global communications, which suddenly made it possible for people around the world to inspect urban and architectural contexts halfway around the world.

The Atlas, then, is a virtual tour of how several hundred architects have approached the question of creating human-scale modernism, one that calls on both universal ideas and local aesthetics. Toward the front of the book, we’re treated to a stunning two-page spread on Renzo Piano’s Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia. Dedicated to a slain independence leader, the center is marked by a row of semi-circular wooden structures—the tallest of which is as high as a nine-story building. (In an ironic twist perhaps meant to underscore the building’s nexus between the local and the global, the structures’ ribs are made of laminated iroko wood brought from West Africa.) Meant to evoke a local village, the structures both define the center and help ameliorate the inevitable tension between a modernist structure and its surroundings, especially when those surroundings are lush, green jungle.

The notion that modernism is anything but a unified whole—or that modernists in different parts of the world will interpret its elements differently—is hardly a new idea. William Curtis, in his magisterial Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1985), highlights the various ways in which regional architects put their own spin on a Western European idea. And yet, with few exceptions, that dialogue was largely limited to Europe, the United States, and occasionally Japan and Latin America. With mid-century modernism, it wasn’t unusual to find top-flight European architects working around the world, but it was rare to find smaller shops doing the same.

Today, as the Atlas makes clear, things have changed. One of the most interesting works in the Atlas is a gateway sculpture built by the Australian firm Denton Corker Marshall for Nanning, a city in southeast China. Lining the main entrance into town are two giant red steel flowers—except that one side only appears whole from a distance; as a driver approaches, the flower reveals itself to be 10 individual petals spread along the road. It’s a wonderful instance of technically savvy design used to express local aesthetics.

A similar marriage of modernism and traditionalism can be seen in the work of local architects in developing countries. Raj Rewal’s Parliamentary Library in New Delhi, for example, incorporates a modernist sense of order with traditional Indian structural elements, such as large open areas inside the buildings and detailing that evokes Mughal-era palaces. Mr. Rewal’s work isn’t limited to India, either; the editors make a point of featuring his Ismaili Centre in Lisbon—proof that, increasingly, the global current of architecture flows both ways.

Many of the European and American projects also display a refreshing sensitivity to their regional and immediate surroundings that will surprise those who think that modern architecture draws its strength from clashing with its context. Steven Holl’s Y House in the Catskills, for example, deftly incorporates a wood-frame vernacular, complete with red cedar slats, into a well-ordered yet creative private home. Similarly, Caruso St. John’s New Art Gallery, in Walsall, England, is a gray, boxy structure inserted neatly into shabby industrial surroundings—but instead of being brought down by its resemblance to the warehouses and abandoned factories around it, the gallery enlivens them by showing the possibility for renewal. And these are just a handful of the hundreds of works highlighted in the Atlas.

The Atlas, of course, runs the risk of providing too much information. It’s one thing to showcase 1,000 buildings; it’s another to hit readers with 2,000 line drawings and some 5,500 photos—many of which, though pretty enough, are redundant when it comes to explicating the building. At the same time, it would have helped to have more critical discussion of the buildings: what the architect was hoping to achieve, what the public reaction has been, how well they work within their contexts. But this is a minor quibble from a text-centric critic; the evidence is there for anyone to see. Making a visual rather than a textual argument is a difficult task, and though well-suited to architecture, it’s rarely attempted. That Phaidon has managed to do so while keeping the Atlas light (at 16 pounds) and engaging is a stunning achievement.

Clay Risen, an assistant editor at The New Republic, writes frequently about architecture.

The official line at the paper is that the 56-year-old Mr. Muschamp "wants to explore other options," which may include serving as a "global culture" columnist and writing for the Styles section and the Magazine .

If the transition is self-motivated, it's also, sources at The Times said, a relief to a new crop of editors unwilling to defend, as their predecessors did, the critic's iconoclasm and obscurantism, his unapologetic dilettantism and his unabashed socializing within the highest social circles of the creative world he judges in print. It's a fall from grace that represents the kind of Times -writer morality tale alumni of the paper know all too well. At the height of his career, Mr. Muschamp's writing was the talk of the New York cultural scene; today, his professional conflicts of interest and very public breakdowns have pushed him to the margins of architectural society. Mr. Muschamp declined to be interviewed for this article, but a source close to him said that he has decided that he had said all he had to say about architecture.

Like those who held his post before him at The Times , Mr. Muschamp sat for years as the de facto arbiter of the architecture world. His constant praise of the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, for example, is widely seen as having been key to her winning the 2004 Pritzker Prize. And while he certainly didn't make Frank Gehry a critical success, his 6,000-word paean to the architect's Guggenheim Bilbao made Mr. Gehry a household name and first among equals in the architectural stratosphere.

Nevertheless, many in the architecture world said that Mr. Muschamp also became corrupted by that very same power, using his influence to promote a small coterie of avant-garde architects while deriding or ignoring the rest of the profession. "This is a critic who does not have much objectivity," said the architect Daniel Libeskind, who, despite a late-round attack from Mr. Muschamp, won the World Trade Center design competition. "He's someone who cultivates certain friendships. If you're not part of it, you do not get reviewed."

Yet even Mr. Muschamp's enemies will grudgingly admit that he is one of the most intelligent critics out there. And it's not just his accumulated knowledge of the field of architecture-he is virtually alone in his ability to draw together seemingly divergent cultural threads, reaching into philosophy, fashion and history. "He's a really keen intellect," said fellow critic James Russell, "because he knows what's going on at every aesthetic level better than anyone else writing."

Mr. Muschamp deployed his intellect and professional influence most effectively in the wake of Sept. 11, when he gathered some of his closest friends-who also happen to be some of the world's best architects-to brainstorm ideas for the W.T.C. site; the results, published in a special issue of The Times Magazine in September 2002, immediately changed the course of the debate and helped spur the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to restart the design process.

"It was a tremendous civic contribution of Mr. Muschamp to do that," said Guy Nordenson, a Muschamp ally who worked on the project. "He helped change history." His demise, then, has an almost Icarus-like quality. It's hard to think of a critic, whether in architecture or any other field, who has come close to this sort of power.

Andy's Boy

The Philadelphia-born Mr. Muschamp wasn't always set on becoming an architecture critic; in college and after, friends said, his interests ran from ballet to modern art. In 1965, as a freshman at Penn, Mr. Muschamp met Andy Warhol at an exhibit of the artist's work on campus. The two bonded quickly-perhaps it was their mutual Pennsylvania heritage-and soon Mr. Muschamp was making frequent weekend trips to New York, hanging out at the Factory, Warhol's studio, and imbibing the fervent downtown art scene of the late 60's.

Mr. Muschamp moved to New York after graduation, where he took a job as a window designer. "Herbert might have been the person who told me that dilettante is not necessarily a put-down, in its root meaning someone who enjoys ," said his longtime friend Randall Bourscheidt, now president of the nonprofit Alliance for the Arts. "There was that kind of dilettante aspect to our youthful explorations of New York, a delight in things-what we saw and did with Andy, but also what we were seeing on stages and museum walls."

All the while, Mr. Muschamp was writing, and gravitating to architecture-perhaps at Warhol's urging (Mr. Muschamp once wrote that the artist told him "architecture is really the only thing left"), perhaps, as Mr. Bourscheidt speculated, because it seemed to link together so many different types of aesthetic experience. In 1974, Mr. Muschamp published his first book, a collection of essays entitled File under Architecture . That year he also won an N.E.A. award for art criticism. In 1978 he moved to London to attend the Architecture Association, a school that has produced such world-class names as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid.

When he returned, he published his second book, Man About Town: Frank Lloyd Wright and New York City , which put him on the map as a serious architecture writer. In 1983, Mr. Muschamp began teaching criticism at the Parsons School of Design, and in 1986 founded its graduate program in architecture and design criticism. As a professor, he was both brilliant and difficult. "I would say that half the assignments were gibberish, the other half were fascinating," one student said. "But you couldn't do them without access to Herbert's head. And you wouldn't know what that was until you were at the table, bleeding."

But while his professional life was turning up, his personal life was struck by tragedy-his long-time partner, Tucker Ashworth, developed AIDS and died in 1987, according to Mr. Bourscheidt, who was close friends with both men. "They were a beautiful, loving couple," recalled Mr. Bourscheidt. "It was a great tragedy when Tucker became ill. Herbert had to become the support and nurse him."

As he lived with the loss of Mr. Ashworth, Mr. Muschamp began to develop a distinctly social point of view. He wrote eloquently about the relationship between architecture and New York's social problems. In a 1988 essay in The New Republic , he bemoaned how, during the 1980's real-estate boom, "architects have been coming across as Satan's decorators, hired flunkies retained to outfit this hell with a bit more dash," having grown cynical of Modernism's "responsibility to initiate reform." And yet, he noted, "suppose you are an architect. If you live in New York, there's a good chance you know more than one person who is sick with AIDS or has already died. You also know that AIDS is not only a disease but a cultural crisis, a crisis of faith in our power and will to solve problems and even to recognize them. So what are you going to do about it?"

It was this sort of very personal cri de coeur that impressed The New Republic 's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, who hired Mr. Muschamp as the magazine's first full-time architecture critic. And it was at The New Republic that Mr. Muschamp's work took on its robust, if idiosyncratic, analytical approach, focusing not on a building's formal qualities-its proportions, the quality of materials-but on buildings as experiences. Readers loved it; Mr. Muschamp's pieces quickly became homework in architectural circles. It was only a matter of time before the opportunity came to claim the architectural criticism throne of The New York Times .

The architecture beat at The Times had been a showcase for some time: Ada Louise Huxtable, who wrote the paper's first regular criticism in 1963 (she now writes for The Wall Street Journal ), received the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1970, an honor repeated by her successor-and Mr. Muschamp's predecessor-Paul Goldberger, now the critic for The New Yorker .

At The Times , Mr. Muschamp talked less about "starchitects" and more about the system that made their position possible, at one point calling out the city's real-estate world for facilitating banal, corporate-friendly architecture in Times Square. He had strong opinions, but they were well-reasoned and clear. "He was welcomed when he first came," said critic James Russell, "because he was not a fence straddler in the mode of Paul Goldberger."

But as Mr. Muschamp settled in as architecture's big macher he gradually began to see architecture within a much different context: fashion, design and stardom, a change that clearly tracked his own shift in milieu-at the top, he was surrounded by glamour and cash. Instead of writing about the role of good design in public-housing projects, he began writing about the role of celebrity in high-end condo projects. Donald Trump, he wrote in 1997, "is top dog in the wave-making business, and wave-making is, if anything, more vital than real estate in the shaping of urban life."

Return of the Starchitects

As his access to, and veneration by, the profession's top names grew, his writing became increasingly populated by a short list of big stars: Zaha Hadid, Rafael Viñoly, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. Unlike Huxtable, who purposely maintained a distance between herself and her subjects, Mr. Muschamp inserted himself into the architectural world, paying extended visits to his favorites and throwing dinner parties for them back home.

His turn to the stars was reflected in his criticism; his strong opinions were now often deployed to defend his favorite architects. When Mr. Eisenman's Aronoff Center for Design in Cincinnati received flak for its use of cheap materials, Mr. Muschamp came to his friend's aid, declaring that cutting corners was in fact a brilliant move: "Shrewdly, Eisenman has employed inexpensive materials and fittings: gypsum walls, catalogue lighting fixtures. These help create a provisional, studio atmosphere, as if the building were itself a pinup project, a thesis mocked up to full scale."

Mr. Muschamp also began to veer into increasingly personal territory, using his Times "Critic's Notebook" column to write about non-architectural topics. In 1997, he wrote about a pair of leather jeans he bought at Century 21: "When I got home and tried them on," he wrote, "I looked as if I had tied two black plastic garbage bags around my legs. I stood up straight and sucked in my gut. Garbage bags. What a letdown." He veered toward the bizarre: In 1996, he wrote about a Times Square billboard of an underwear-clad Antonio Sabato Jr., calling it "a worthy, if fleeting, addition to the classic tradition of civic sculpture."

As Mr. Muschamp's work became more personal and obscure, his dominance of all things architectural at The Times became more prominent. He demanded, and usually received, veto power over all other articles on architecture in the newspaper, according to Times insiders. He would declare certain projects, even whole topics, off limits to everyone but himself, even if he never actually covered them. But for all his detractors, Mr. Muschamp was one of the paper's most talked-about critics, and so editors were loath to knock him down.

Hints of his decline, though, were increasingly apparent. He began telling people that he'd had enough of The Times , and in 1997 he agreed to take a job with The New Yorker , only to back out at the last minute (the job ultimately went to Mr. Goldberger). At least once, the pressure seemed to take him over the edge. At a packed MoMA conference on contemporary architecture in April 1999, Mr. Muschamp mounted the stage, unlit cigarette in hand, and ranted at length (several people close to him said he was intoxicated). "We've seen great movies," an item in New York magazine reported he said, "but we haven't seen one fucking building, okay? And if that's put in the same category of spectacle with Disney, goody!"

Mr. Muschamp's power-and infamy-finally came to fruition in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Mr. Muschamp lives in Tribeca, and had gone out to dinner on Sept. 10 with Frank Gehry, Mr. Gehry's son, and the designer Issay Miyake. The next morning, like thousands of New Yorkers living downtown, he awoke to sirens and smoke. "I think [Sept. 11] shook him to the rafters," Mr. Gehry said. "He wouldn't come out of his apartment for days."

Angry with the banality with which the rebuilding plans were coming together, Mr. Muschamp quarterbacked a plan for an architectural showcase, a sort of exhibit-in-print in which the practice's top names would contribute ideas for Ground Zero. The project, which ran as a special issue of The New York Times Magazine , was a great success; though derided by many as having crossed the line between critic and master of ceremonies, Mr. Muschamp can be credited with having moved the debate on Ground Zero to a higher level. "It gave the sense that something better was possible," said Mr. Nordenson.

But then things turned ugly. At first, Mr. Muschamp had backed Daniel Libeskind's plan in the Innovative Design Competition, which the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation had convened to select a master plan for the site. "If you are looking for the marvelous, here's where you will find it," he wrote in December 2002. But when the competition was narrowed to two finalists-Mr. Libeskind and THINK, led by perennial Muschamp favorite and personal friend Rafael Viñoly-the critic switched sides and attacked the Libeskind plan. The design, he now wrote, "looks stunted … an astonishingly tasteless idea."

Earlier this year, rumors began to circulate that Mr. Muschamp was interfering with an Architectural Record book project of collected Ground Zero plans. Mr. Muschamp accused the editors of falsely telling architects who had participated in his Times Magazine project that they had his approval, and several backed out of the Architectural Record book. In response, the editors prepared a lawsuit against Mr. Muschamp for tortuous interference. "They went back and forth, lawyers bickering, raising clubs, saber rattling," said one observer of the fracas.

By the end of March, Mr. Muschamp had agreed to back down, and he allowed the Record editors to send out a letter saying he no longer opposed the book. But the damage was done to both the book and Mr. Muschamp's reputation-only 5 of the 15 architects from the Times project are in the book.

Why, given the precipitous decline in his critical stature, did The Times keep him on for so long? "Herbert's enduring existence [at The Times ] is one of the great urban legends," says one person active in architectural circles. "It's one of the great mysteries of New York, along with why you never see baby pigeons."

But as the post-Muschamp era begins, the field, though brimming with talent, will now lack the sort of expansive personality that made it interesting beyond the narrow confines of the builders' world. Many people outside of architecture know of Muschamp; who, outside the field, has heard of Blair Kamin? Which is why his successor, people are beginning to realize, could do a whole lot worse. "The worst thing," said the critic Mr. Russell, "would be if they got someone bland."

It's not just ironic, but disappointing as well. Because as successful as Ms. Lin's Vietnam memorial was, the eight finalists prove that it has become a crutch, rather than an inspiration, for American memorial architecture.

Indeed, Ms. Lin's aesthetic presence in the plans speaks volumes about the state of memorial design in America. On one hand, the continued presence of Lin-esque minimalism in American monuments points to the long-awaited emergence of an American memorial style; on the other, the finalists' failure to move beyond the threshold she set more than two decades ago points to a severe lack of vision in the way Americans build memorials to tragedy.

As a class, such architecture has always reflected the values at stake in remembering those who died. Since Ms. Lin's memorial, so appropriate to the memory of a war that tore the American sensibility apart, the urge to liberate the visitor-from official interpretations, from having to make specific moral evaluations-has overtaken the need to speak to the visitor. The finalists present the reductive consequence of that urge: In their effort to say something about annihilation and nothingness, these designs say nothing at all.

Beyond abstract references to absence and loss-such as the abyss-centered reflecting pools of "Reflecting Absence," according to polls the most popular scheme-there is no attempt to grapple with the meaning of Sept. 11, to mark the attack as an historical event.

Whose Memorial?

About a decade ago, the Department of Energy convened a study group of architects, physicists and artists to chew over a hitherto unconsidered problem: How can the government mark radioactive waste sites, which will be dangerous for another 10,000 years, in a way that could ensure future civilizations-with perhaps little understanding of our culture-would nevertheless understand what lay beneath.

That was the task for Ms. Lin and her commission: How could the monument convey to future generations what happened on Sept. 11? It is a difficult question, but then it is also the most important one. And yet the commission failed completely, largely because, instead of approaching the site itself, it courted the ideals of abstract minimalism and then manhandled them to fit Ground Zero.

"Memorials tend to vibrate between two poles, history and memory," said Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic . "Each of them comes with hazards. History can be political or pedantic, but memory can also be simply an emotional overload, can make you want to raise your lighter without knowing why."

Instead, we get a variety of easy strategies, first and foremost the listing of the victims' names. Granted, this was an unspoken requirement of the competition. But the designers focus on the individuals to an almost fetishistic extent; the length of the cables holding the votive candles-one for each victim-in "Votives in Suspension" is determined by the victim's age. As is the literal case in "Suspending Memory," which features two fields of individualized glass steles amid a leafy arbor, they can't see the forest for the trees.

That fetish is taken even further by a feature of two designs, "Reflecting Absence" and "Lower Waters": an area set aside for victims' families. There is, of course, a practical, even epistemological problem with such a scheme: How far does a family extend, both in contemporary terms and future generations?

Ultimately, though, what's most important is that these plans use design to make an exclusionary statement that in turn limits their effectiveness-because those unrelated to the event cannot understand it, they cannot see the site as a whole, and vice versa.

"The site is a graveyard, but it can't be just a graveyard," said Mr. Wieseltier. "If it addresses itself exclusively or primarily to the survivors and the families, then it will fail in its larger spiritual and historical purpose."

The families-only areas are also indicative of a larger problem with the designs: They look to the here and now rather than to posterity. Many of them use advanced technology ("Dual Memory," for example, features a room full of glass plates with the victims' images projected onto them) or imply constant maintenance (keeping all 2,982 oil lamps in "Votives in Suspension" lit could prove a nightmare) that can hardly be expected to function in perpetuity.

What's more, the designs, lacking history, are merely emotional; and by refusing to make a single, historical comment about Sept. 11 in favor of providing a bunch of cheap, abstraction-inspired thrills, they merely extend the tragedy. They are little more than theme parks of emotion-in this corner, relive that oceanic sense of loss you felt that morning; over there, cry over the sheer number of the dead.

But perhaps the worst transgression of the plans is the fact that none of them recognizes what stood at the site; a visitor with no knowledge of Sept. 11 would have a hard time figuring out that two 110-story towers once occupied the space (the lone exception, and only by a stretch, is "Inversion of Light," which features a composite of the north tower's plans for the 94th and 95th floors in its footprint).

Nor is there any attempt to tie the site into its surroundings, either the rest of Ground Zero or lower Manhattan as a whole. Again, this is a disadvantage of abstraction's fungibility-it works, but it works in relation only to itself, not its context. Then again, context wasn't important with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; it's in Washington, not Vietnam, and thus its surroundings have little relevance to its form. In fact, as its Alabama cousin shows, its fungibility is an asset, as it can be replicated effortlessly without losing its power.

But at Ground Zero, as in Oklahoma City, the task of placing a memorial on the site of a national tragedy requires a fundamental relationship between the site and the form. To do so in abstract terms, though, is difficult, because there's not a lot of room for literal signification in the minimalist vocabulary.

It's strange that little outcry has been made over the finalists' decision not to incorporate pieces of the World Trade Center-after all, crews at Fresh Kills separated out tons of steel from the enormous piles of debris as candidates for use in a memorial. The idea of incorporating the Trade Center was in heavy circulation during the 2002 discussion of potential memorial designs-Met director Philippe de Montebello suggested using some of the jagged fragments of the buildings that remained standing, a reference both to the destroyed towers and the presence of hope amidst tragedy-so it's a fair assumption that the finalists made a conscious decision not to include it. And how could they have? Within Ms. Lin's minimalism, there's no room for such literalism.

After Maya Lin

Of course, it's not just the Ground Zero designs that rely on Ms. Lin's aesthetic. Since practically the moment the Vietnam memorial was completed, American memorial designers glommed onto abstraction and minimalism as the ultimate expression of memory and loss. Such is the importance of Ms. Lin's work that academics who study memorials and memorialization (a burgeoning interdisciplinary field that can only loosely be categorized as "memory studies") tend to speak in terms of B.M.L. and A.M.L.-before and after Maya Lin.

"When people think about memorials in the United States now, they think about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial," said Marita Sturken, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California and the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering . "The way we memorialize in America changed with that design."

Despite initial controversy (revolving as much around Ms. Lin herself, at the time an asocial Yale undergrad-and of Asian heritage to boot), the Vietnam memorial has achieved an overpowering status in the pantheon of American memorials, looming over even its neighbors on the National Mall. Ms. Lin's success lay in her understanding of the symbolic possibilities of minimalism, namely that it accommodates a wide variety of interpretations.

"The memorial is successful at giving people a range of responses," said Ms. Sturken. "And it's successful for people who have a range of opinions about the war."

That flexibility was vital in the context of Vietnam, which even today can cause heated dinner-table discussions. Is the memorial a cut in the earth, symbolizing the wound caused by the war, or is it an attempt to bring order to a cut already made, a nod to the good intentions that motivated American involvement? It's both, or neither.

"The meaning was murky," said John Bodnar, chairman of the history department at Indiana University and co-director of its Center for the Study of History and Memory.

Such flexibility is also what made the Vietnam memorial the perfect template for memorials built in the following years. The Alabama Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, is an almost exact (though slightly smaller) version of Ms. Lin's, a long slab of black granite etched with the names of the dead.

Abstraction is politically efficient as well. In an era when wars are rarely as unifying or as justified as World War II, using the triumphalist, representational terminology of classical monuments would be exorbitantly controversial. For proof, consider the much-derided World War II memorial currently under construction on the Mall, which has been called everything from "retrograde" to "quasi-fascist"-and it commemorates perhaps the most just war in American history.

"Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated," said Mr. Bodnar, "there's been much more of an attempt to become more abstract in our representation of death and loss and sacrifice, in order to restore that sense of nobility-so that sacrifices would tend to be represented in positive ways."

Perhaps abstraction's greatest asset, though, is its fungibility. The Vietnam memorial's cut-in-the-earth, negative-space-as-monument design works perfectly in the context of a controversial and painful war, but it's not hard to imagine it, with only a few revisions, working just as well to commemorate the Oklahoma City bombing.

In a way, though, that fungibility is also minimalism's greatest weakness-it doesn't allow much range to make specific statements about the event commemorated. Indeed, what was ultimately built at the site of the Murrah Federal Building-a field of chairs, one for each victim-is perhaps the most successful advancement of Ms. Lin's minimalism, but even it fails to make much of a statement about the 1995 bombing, relying instead on a lackluster museum to fill in the site-specific details.

There are other American monuments which, were the glare of the Vietnam memorial not so bright, might have given better direction to the designers. Tops on that list would be the U.S.S. Arizona memorial, perhaps the best American attempt to mark a tragedy on the site where it took place.

Its success, said Mr. Bodnar, comes from its courage to mix literal elements-the hull of the ship, lying beneath the monument, holds the remains of some 1,000 sailors-with a simple, beautiful white structure that both allows visitors to see the destruction up close and at the same time embodies a resolve to move beyond it.

He said the U.S.S. Arizona memorial tells its visitors, "We will encase that loss within a larger theme of restoring hope and moving on."

It's a clear and powerful message-and one that's unmistakable some 60 years after Pearl Harbor. But no matter which finalist is chosen, it's unlikely that in 60 years we will be able to say the same thing about Ground Zero.

The Tully grant isn't large enough to constitute a turning point for Lincoln Center's efforts at self-reclamation. But it came on like a propitious gale, buffeting the whole project out onto calmer waters, and it coincides with a number of other positive turns in the renovation saga. The center's various companies have blown off all their steam and accepted the idea of major changes on their home turf. And though the budget is tight, that could be just the thing to discipline the unruly ambitions of the many factions and force a greater focus on what matters. Improving the center's public spaces-which, far from being merely a sop to civic groups, is constitutionally important to the institution's survival-and gutting Avery Fisher are now at the top of the list.

At the same time, Lincoln Center has corralled both the avant-garde studio Diller and Scofidio and Britain's Foster and Partners to lead the renovations. These top-notch firms bring with them a proven ability to rethink old problems, and, increasingly, Lincoln Center's problems seem like the kind they can fix. At a place like Lincoln Center, where an unlikely group of troubled institutions once scattered throughout Manhattan came together to share in a Robert Moses brainchild-a boon that was largely a matter of architecture and real estate-the crumbling campus is still the ligature that holds the institution together; and so architecture may yet save the day.

Four years ago, when the center embarked on the planning phase of its massive renovation project, it could hardly have foreseen the backstabbings and budget cuts that soon afterward made it a regular laughingstock in the newspapers.

"The infighting at Lincoln Center resembles the kind of insidious arguments that sometimes tear families apart," The New York Times editorialized in 2001.

The story of Lincoln Center has always been focused on what went wrong. Practically from the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the center's groundbreaking ceremony in 1959, critics were calling it an elitist temple to high art, isolated architecturally and economically from the rest of the city.

Robert Moses, the city's construction czar for much of the mid-century, at first conceived of Lincoln Center as way to boost property values around Columbus Circle. The planning phase involved some of the biggest names in New York history: The Kennedys provided some of the land (and got a sweet profit off the sale); the Rockefellers provided a big chunk of the funding; and Wallace Harrison, who led the architectural efforts at Rockefeller Center and the U.N. headquarters, oversaw a design dream team of Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and Max Abramovitz, among others.

But while Lincoln Center jump-started gentrification around Columbus Circle, this case study in superblock architecture also provided city planners with a definitive lesson in how not to design cultural institutions. Nor has the center exactly stood the test of time-with 10 million visitors annually, the place is in need of major repair, plagued as it is by pesky plumbing and crumbling floors.

In 1998, long-neglected maintenance problems across the campus and chronic acoustic problems in Avery Fisher and Alice Tully halls forced the Lincoln Center Committee on the 21st Century to commission a renovation study from the architectural firm Beyer, Blinder and Belle. The study was presented in two versions: a $1.5 billion "wish list," which tried to satisfy all the complaints of the center's various artistic companies, and a scaled-back, $800 million budget that presented a more realistic approach to the center's renovation.

But it often seemed that it was precisely the idea of spending $1.5 billion-more, even in adjusted dollars, than the cost of the original construction-that drove the ensuing infighting. With big plans in the making, the monstrous egos that inhabit the center hurried to define their turf. When the center floated a plan for a new home for the City Opera on Damrosch Park, for example, the Metropolitan Opera threatened to withdraw from the renovations, throwing the entire project in doubt.

But as the center's ambitions have deflated, so too have the passions. The Met has more or less fallen into line, and with the Philharmonic slinking back to Avery Fisher Hall, hat in hand, from its short-lived deal with Carnegie Hall, the center's management is finally in control of the renovation process.

Architecturally, the site benefits from a reduced budget as well. One of the leading ideas trotted out under the wish-list budget was an enormous, Frank Gehry–designed glass dome; it would be hard to think of a better way to isolate the center further from its surroundings.

Other wish-list ideas included demolishing Avery Fisher and perhaps other halls as well, under the idea that the only way to save Lincoln Center was to destroy it. But that's the same outmoded tabula rasa thinking that drove Robert Moses to tear down the entire San Juan Hill neighborhood to build Lincoln Center in the first place. And there is much to like about the buildings, designed as they were by a dream team of International-style modernists.

"The buildings are very much of their time," said Martin Pedersen, editor of Metropolis magazine, "and in that way they are sort of lovable. Anything that's large enough and stays around becomes loved. They're a part of the cultural fabric of New York."

With less money, those sorts of grand, disastrous gestures are off the table. Instead, the center has focused on approaching the project in manageable chunks, and earlier this year hired the architectural firm Diller and Scofidio to tackle the largest of those, the renovation of its public spaces. "It's a curious choice, an interesting choice," said Mr. Pedersen, because the firm is better known for its theoretical work than its few realized projects.

Indeed, Diller and Scofidio has its work cut out for it. The irony of Lincoln Center has always been that its architecture and planning, designed to showcase the art within, ended up imprisoning it. The main entrance, on the campus' eastern side, fronts the busy Broadway and Columbus intersection, while 65th Street, which cuts between the main campus and the Juilliard School, is a dark, cavernous passage with only a small staircase linking it to the center.

Diller and Scofidio plans to renovate Lincoln Center's public space in several phases, starting with 65th Street and working south to Josie Robertson Plaza and Damrosch Park. While the firm hasn't released definitive plans yet, a basic outline is emerging.

"One of the first things we're doing is to re-establish 65th Street as a major entrance," said Robert Donnelly, the firm's project leader for the site. "We're proposing to narrow the street and widen the sidewalk, so [people won't] feel so pushed up against buildings."

But 65th Street isn't just forbidding; it's also inconvenient. None of the major theaters open onto it-Avery Fisher, set to be the newly renovated center's crown jewel, has its back completely turned on the street.

"It's true that Avery Fisher backs onto [65th Street]," said Mr. Donnelly, "and we're sort of waiting to see what Foster and Partners proposes with its gutting."

But short of tearing down the hall and rebuilding at 180 degrees, it's hard to imagine how to mitigate this flaw. Demolition is virtually out of the question, given a lack of funds and the staunch opposition of the Fisher family, which means that the center will emerge post-renovation with a split visage-the anchor theaters will still open onto Columbus Avenue, and a second grand entrance will run perpendicular along 65th Street.

All of which means that some serious creative thinking is in order. Fortunately, that's what makes Diller and Scofidio such an inspired choice for the project. While the firm may not have as much actual building experience as its counterparts, its recent show at the Whitney proves its ability to find original ways of mediating and strengthening the relationship between people and architecture. One of the central elements in its phase-one plan, for example, is a variety of electronic marquees along 65th Street that will both provide information to patrons and bring a sense of activity to what could otherwise remain a side street.

The center's other major project, at least this early in the process, is the Foster and Partners renovation of Avery Fisher Hall. Lord Norman Foster, the firm's head, is widely recognized as one of the world's best architects; but more importantly, his 500-person firm has extensive experience with the sort of complex, specialized engineering issues that Avery Fisher demands.

Lord Foster's challenge is twofold. While the firm has yet to release plans for the project, he is constrained by funding and politics from tearing down the hall completely. As a result, he has to figure out a way to ameliorate the hall's uninviting lobby and clarify the access paths to the reception area on the second floor, all while keeping in mind the center's overall aesthetic.

It's a challenge that reminds one immediately of the extraordinary success Lord Foster had in renovating the Reichstag in Berlin. There, as at Lincoln Center, Lord Foster was charged with re-imagining the space while keeping the building's exterior intact. His solution was to top the 19th-century structure with a sleek glass dome, fitted inside with a double-helixed ramp from which visitors could peer down into the Bundestag hall itself. If Lord Foster can bring even some of that creativity to Lincoln Center, then his Avery Fisher project will be a success.

Lord Foster's second challenge is to settle once and for all Avery Fisher's infamous acoustic deficiencies. This means going beyond the complete gutting and refitting that the hall received in 1976. Fortunately, this is another reason why Lord Foster is an excellent choice for the renovation. Not only can he do the bulk of the engineering work in-house, but he has a great track record of working with specialty firms on matters beyond his ken.

"If anyone can figure it out, he can," said Mr. Pedersen. "He'll probably find someone to work with him; he'll hook up with [Yasuhisa] Toyota or one of the other great acousticians."

Of course, none of this will happen without funding, and even the estimated $800 million needed to complete the project isn't guaranteed. In January 2001, the city promised to contribute $240 million, but with the economic downturn it has only been able to deliver $24 million. And until recently, only a trickle of private funds has fallen into the center's coffers.

Nevertheless, there are some good signs that the funding picture will improve. There's the Alice Tully money, which fund-raisers hope will spur more donations before the end of the year. And in February, the center hired Rosemarie Garipoli to lead the Campaign for Lincoln Center, its fund-raising arm. Ms. Garipoli is an excellent choice, having led successful fund-raising efforts at the Guggenheim and the New York Botanical Garden.

In recent years, critics have used Lincoln Center's renovation quagmire as an opportunity to attack it for what they see as an elitist, anachronistic artistic program. But the center's problem has always been in its architecture, not its art, and with 10 million visitors a year, it's hardly the case that people don't go in for classical music anymore. (And besides, there's a place for everything. No one chastises the Bowery Ballroom for the lack of chamber groups on its schedule.)

Lincoln Center's challenge is not to make its program more amenable to the whims of current public taste, but to influence taste by making the classical arts more amenable to the public. And the first and most important step toward that goal is improving its facilities, making them both more inviting and more integrated into the surrounding community. After years of setbacks, Lincoln Center appears ready to do just that.

P ALIGN="JUSTIFY"

Visiting the city on a fellowship during the architecturally moribund mid-70's, Mr. Koolhaas wrote Delirious New York , a self-styled "retroactive manifesto" that laid out what had made New York an architectural capital and what it would take to regain the title. It put him at the forefront of New York's architectural elites before he had laid a single brick.

But lately, Mr. Koolhaas' position in New York has been severely diminished. He has lost a slew of American contracts, and after landing a major deal in China he's been building a harsh critique of architecture in New York, and in the West in general. He is, it would seem, delirious no more. As he mounts his critique, the new Koolhaas will have to prove he is still relevant-and not just picking sour grapes.

Mr. Koolhaas' relationship to New York City is at the center of his conundrum. Shortly after writing Delirious New York , he left the city for the Netherlands, and he now lives in London. But the central argument in Delirious New York -that New York's architectural greatness stemmed from a meeting of two opposing forces, the strictly maintained street grid and the unstoppable power of speculative building-made him the leading theorist of New York's built environment. New York was the singular place, he wrote, where "creation and destruction [are] irrevocably interlocked." And he declared, portentously, that his theory would "yield a formula for an architecture that is at once ambitious and popular."

No one doubts whether Delirious New York matters: Today it is required reading at many architecture programs, even though its author didn't complete a project until 1991. It's gone through a number of printings, and original copies fetch hundreds of dollars on the used-book market. And it laid the foundation for an entire Koolhaas library, much of which built on the ideas first presented in Delirious . And though Mr. Koolhaas has recently begun to add actual buildings to his résumé, it was largely thanks to his written work that he received architecture's Nobel, the Pritzker Prize, in 2000-the youngest recipient ever.

So when Mr. Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, finally won a series of high-profile contracts in New York during the late 1990's-a new Prada store in Soho, a $200 million Whitney expansion and a new Ian Schrager hotel on Astor Place-architectural insiders wondered aloud whether the time had come for him to prove his mettle.

And, not surprisingly, when both the Whitney and the Schrager contracts collapsed-along with a new headquarters for Universal, a $400 million renovation at the L.A. County Museum of Art and a failed bid for a new Secretariat building at the United Nations-Mr. Koolhaas' critics went on the attack.

Privately, they said that Mr. Koolhaas was too arrogant and uncompromising to work in a city like New York, where arcane regulations and the vicissitudes of high finance make architecture-by-committee a necessity. (Ironically, this was something Mr. Koolhaas praised in Delirious New York .)

And while many of his contracts fell apart because of the recession, it didn't help that Mr. Koolhaas insisted on huge price tags for his projects and, in some cases, alienated clients with his insistent, expansive personality. (As if to prove his critics' point, during a lecture at Columbia Mr. Koolhaas bragged that his design for Schrager had "inspired terror in the inventor of the boutique hotel.")

Mr. Koolhaas' critics even circulated rumors that O.M.A. was on the verge of bankruptcy. The New York Post reported that "the world's hippest architect" would be "closing his New York office after several lucrative American commissions were canceled," and one rumor even held that Mr. Koolhaas had been axed by his own firm. He soon added fuel to the fire during the Columbia speech, when he said, off the cuff, that he "admitted defeat in New York."

But despite his losses stateside-as a result of which he has had to lay off about 40 people, or more than a third of his staff-Mr. Koolhaas is hardly laying down his epee. Instead, he is turning to a place that has quickly become a mecca for world-class architects: China.

Wagons East

O.M.A. partner Josh Ramus runs the firm's offices on Varick Street. There, on a recent morning, he pulled out a sheet of paper and quickly drew a world map.

"He kind of went this way to America," Mr. Ramus said, drawing an arrow from Europe to New York. "It didn't work, so now he's going to go around this way. If it didn't work by going west, he's going east."

He's not alone.

"Every architect in the world right now is looking at China, because it seems to offer limitless opportunity," said Robert Ivey, editor of Architectural Record . "It's a place of almost unstoppable optimism-despite this momentary setback from SARS-and immense building projects that are ideally suited for someone who positions himself right on the cusp of change, as [Mr. Koolhaas] does."

Indeed, thanks to a combination of the Olympics, a fast-growing economy and heavy amounts of overseas investment, high-profile architecture is all the rage in China. The team of Herzog and de Meuron, another Pritzker winner, is building the stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Norman Foster is designing an entire city district in Hong Kong. And the mega-firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill has built a series of major projects, including Shanghai's Jin Mao building, one of the world's tallest.

Mr. Koolhaas himself has landed one of China's largest architectural contracts to date, the $664 million China Cable Television headquarters in Beijing. The sort of building that architecture students dream of designing, it's an anti-skyscraper straight out of Blade Runner , almost indescribable in its form-imagine a giant letter D, slightly torqued. At 5.5 million feet and 80 floors, it will be the largest building in Beijing.

"He's chasing the dollars like any architect," said Martin Pedersen, editor of Metropolis magazine. "They all want to build, and you go where there are clients willing to build and fund. China is one of those places. And they are mega-projects-they are huge . Architects love that sort of challenge, working on that size of scale. Especially Rem-Rem likes to build at a big scale. China is where he can do it."

And it's not just the CCTV project. Others are in the offing as well, said Mr. Ramus. "We're getting a lot of interest. People are sending us maybe one or two projects a week, really major projects: a media center, we did a competition for a new national library, for sports facilities, and for a new [central business district] for Beijing."

Not surprisingly, many of the things Mr. Koolhaas praises about China are exactly the things he blames for his failures in the United States. For one, he is quick to praise Chinese culture, especially China's burgeoning entrepreneurial culture, as infused with a proclivity for daring experimentation.

"It's a very young culture, and that implies a kind of energy and optimism," he told The Observer in a recent telephone interview. "And a very bold culture."

And then there's the Chinese government's enormous amount of cultural funding. "In the case of the Whitney," Mr. Koolhaas said, "we were supported by the director and the staff, but you still feel the situation is much more vulnerable. One of the difficulties in America is that funding for cultural institutions is not a given; it is entirely dependent on fund-raising. In China, it is completely different."

Mr. Koolhaas put it even more explicitly at his Columbia lecture. China, he said, has developed "communism in the form of a state that can still have a purpose," while in the West, "there is not potential alignment for architecture to a project that could be for the public good."

For a moment, it was as if the lecture-which drew so many people that more than 100 had to sit in an adjacent room and watch it over video-had been teleported to the Left Bank circa 1968. In the West, Mr. Koolhaas told his audience, "there is an increasing idolatry of the market as a concept, in which architecture was taken in a drastic manner from its base." He even noted-with pride-that at the CCTV contract-signing, he'd read a quotation from Chairman Mao.

China also bears out, at least on one level, many of the ideas Mr. Koolhaas first proposed in Delirious New York . He says that architects working in America have been reduced to mere aestheticians, as he predicted in 1978, while corporate capital has taken over much of the building process.

As Exhibit A, he often cites the recent World Trade Center competition.

"[Daniel] Libeskind, with admirable efficiency, has succeeded in capturing the totalitarian moment," Mr. Koolhaas said at the Columbia speech.

Out East, he continued, it's different. China is "really experimenting with things," he said. "It's partly the youth, partly the economy. Modernization is really taking place."

And though Mr. Koolhaas might not admit it, China is also appealing in that its well-funded command economy fits his own domineering personality. By providing him with what amounts to a blank check, China offers the flexibility and control that he demanded-and failed to receive-for his American projects. Not so New York City.

"There's no public process in China," said Mr. Pedersen. "There's not those same sort of distractions."

Clearly, Mr. Koolhaas wants to do for architecture in China what he did for architecture in New York-establish himself as its intellectual leader, though this time he's hoping to be a major player on the ground as well.

And he's already taking the offense, accusing other Western firms of violating China's cultural sovereignty. He singles out Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for particular abuse; Skidmore, he claims, is little more than an architectural colonialist, addressing its projects in China as problems while treating the Chinese themselves as backward and incapable of good design. Skidmore's work in China is "so infantile and so regressive that they should be sued," he said.

Mr. Ramus agreed.

"Americans see this as: 'They are asking for our salvation,'" he said during a recent interview at O.M.A.'s Varick Street office, a hectic loft strewn with scale models and spec books. "Get off it. They know what the fuck they're doing. They are taking the best we've got, at a good price. They're manipulating us as much as we're manipulating them."

Command Architecture

But there is an irony here that New Yorkers will recognize. While, on one level, Mr. Koolhaas' thoughts on China do draw on Delirious New York , on another level they run counter to it. When Mr. Koolhaas writes, for example, that "the essence and strength of Manhattan is that all its architecture is 'by committee' and that the committee is Manhattan's inhabitants themselves," it's hard to think of a more direct antonym than China, with its command economy and enormous skyscrapers built with little consideration of who will fill them.

It was never easy to say kind things about the state of architecture in New York-which was part of Delirious New York 's iconoclastic appeal.

"Even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to get anything done," said Mr. Pedersen. "It's hard to name five really great buildings in New York that have been built since 1970 …. There are all sorts of social, political and mostly financial, economic factors that weigh against good buildings getting built."

It's also possible that what lies at the heart of anti-Koolhaas sentiment is a recognition of the large grain of truth in what he has to say. After all, who could watch Larry Silverstein muscle his way into the World Trade Center design-something that was supposedly a public endeavor-and not wish that some benevolent government agency couldn't step in and take over?

But Mr. Koolhaas' difficulty in selling his ideas about China may be less about their worth than his personality.

"He's an uncompromising fellow," said Mr. Pedersen. "I've had dealings with him, and he's not an easy personality. He's a prickly guy, and he's kind of arrogant."

Ultimately, Mr. Koolhaas' biggest stumbling block to regaining credibility among architecture's chattering class may be the simple fact that he hasn't completed many projects, a problem he himself recognizes.

"Skepticism is totally justified," he said. "But the terrible thing is that you can't do anything about it until something is there. So I am seriously committed. Once these buildings are there, things will be different."

Ironically, that credibility may come thanks not to the CCTV building, but to the completion of two of his remaining American projects, a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the main branch of the Seattle Public Library.

"When we have two buildings on the ground, then we will see where we are," he said. "And people will see what we have done. I hope their response will be enthusiastic and also surprised. Actually, I am quite optimistic."

Indeed, two things become evident when talking to Mr. Koolhaas. One is that, despite his dour Euro-hipness, he is actually an unrepentant optimist, and one gets the impression that his prohibitively expensive plans have less to do with his own ego than with an honest, if ambitious, desire to use architecture to advance society: the bigger the project, the more society advances.

And, perhaps as a result, most of his supporters think he'll work in New York again. "He'll be back," said Mr. Ivey of Architectural Record . "We're at the nexus, still at the nexus of the communication and world events, and no one who's a serious architect is not going to want to be here."

Or, as Mr. Ivey put it, "One day we'll wake up with a great project in New York, and his name will be associated with it."

Not surprisingly, there's been a lot of resistance to the idea that Mr. Koolhaas can stake out an intellectual lead. Many of his critics are simply dismissive, claiming that his "critique" is little more than a smokescreen to cover his shortcomings in America. Skidmore, after all, may be a neocolonial carpetbagger, but one of its chief architects, David Childs, has seen his star rising in New York-he's taken the lead on AOL Time Warner's Columbus Circle and the new Penn Station, as well as a back-room role in the World Trade Center project-along the reverse arc that Mr. Koolhaas' own star has fallen.

Even his supporters admit to a bit of truth in that accusation.

"Is there a degree of sour grapes to this, because a lot of the projects in New York didn't work out? Yeah," said Mr. Pedersen.

Mr. Ramus, a somewhat savvier, younger version of the master, who came to O.M.A. after Mr. Koolhaas sat on his thesis jury at Harvard, concurred.

"The one thing I didn't like about Rem's lecture at Columbia is, it sounded very self-pitying," he said.

Yet despite his newfound interest in China and his harsh words for American architects, Mr. Koolhaas is ultimately still enamored with New York City. "I love New York. But part of love," he said, "is criticism."