Las Urbanistas

Nine months after a spectacular fire damaged a Kenner hotel, the property remains abandoned and dilapidated, with city officials hoping it will be returned to commerce.

“If within about 30 days something is not done out there, I’m going to press that the city take aggressive action against the owner to repair or demolish it,” said Councilman Joe Stagni, who represents the area.

In June, a fire raged at the vacant hotel at 2438 Veterans Memorial Blvd., formerly a Best Western, and fire officials said at the time that vagrants might have been living there. Kenner police have said vagrants were arrested at the empty building before the fire.

Neighbors complained to Stagni, and the Kenner Code Enforcement Department demanded that owners erect a fence around the building.

“I was really pushing Code Enforcement to get a fence up,” Stagni said, adding that vagrants were interrupting business for neighbors, including one who was forced to hire a security detail.

Keith Chiro, Kenner’s director of Code Enforcement and Inspections, said the fence was erected a couple of months after the fire.

His office then sent a notice in January asking about the building’s status, Chiro said. The building includes numerous suites, some with different owners. A sign outside the property identifies it as New Orleans Suites Hotel.

Chiro said he was told by the Garden Vue Square Owners Association, Inc. that a sale is imminent.

“Now they’re telling us it’s very close to being done,” Chiro said.

Officers of Garden Vue listed on the Louisiana secretary of state’s Web site could not be reached Tuesday.

A neighbor, Brandt Enterprises, LLC, sued one of the owners, Kenner Hospitality LLC, saying Hurricane Katrina’s winds caused the hotel’s west wall to collapse onto a Toyota dealership that was under construction. That lawsuit was filed in 24th Judicial District Court and is ongoing, according to the Jefferson Parish clerk of court’s office.

A Kenner Hospitality representative would not comment on the status of the building.

Stagni said he hopes the battered building’s future will be resolved soon.

“It’s been sitting there for quite some time now,” he said. “Rather than just let it sit there and be an eyesore on the city I’d like to see this go back into commerce.”

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Mary Sparacello can be reached at msparacello@timespicayune.com or (504) 467-1726.

Mold in public places is dangerous, life-threatening even. Except when it isn’t.

The only way to tell whether the mold in question is malignant or benign is to ask the officials in charge of it.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was mold at Charity Hospital. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne went in and started to clean it.

Don Smithburg, the chief executive of Louisiana State University hospitals, which runs Charity, ordered the cleanup to stop because he thought it was an unsafe environment. Too unsafe, one gathers, even for the 82nd Airborne.

However, Dr. Eric J. Hovland, the dean of LSU’s dental school, dares to go where troopers are forbidden to tread.

The dental school lay languishing while the 82nd Airborne was on its cleanup mission. When dental school officials began their cleanup, it took two weeks to pump the water out of the school.

But by the summer, the dental school will reopen. Charity, its cleanup aborted, will never reopen, we are told.

Veterans make do

For years, wounded veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lived amid creepy conditions at Building 18, a government facility affiliated with Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Last month, the Washington Post did a series about the facility in which they uncovered “mold, rot, mice and cockroaches, but also a larger bureaucratic indifference that has impeded some soldiers’ recovery.”

n response to the uproar, President Bush promised an investigation.

However, in the meantime, Building 18 is to be cleaned and repaired. Apparently that mold doesn’t present the sort of clear and present danger that warrants moving patients out of the facility.

The mold at the shuttered public housing complexes in New Orleans is different. Citing the danger of mold, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is barring tenants from returning to their apartments.

Apparently wounded war veterans are less susceptible to mold-related illness than are otherwise healthy residents of public housing.

A convenient truth

Let’s see if I understand this:

Sick people in New Orleans are better off not having a hospital than they would be if they had a hospital that had been sanitized.

Dental students, and by extension, their patients, can do just as well in a post-mold environment, provided it’s been cleaned.

Public housing residents are so fragile that they cannot be allowed to return to sanitized apartments.

Wounded war veterans are strong enough to remain in a post-mold environment, provided a cleanup is taking place around them.

Most important, mold is like Silly Putty, easily manipulated to fit the agenda at hand.

. . . . . . .

Lolis Eric Elie can be reached at lelie@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3330.

As a child, Beryl Ragas remembers how lively and vibrant life was in Old Algiers.

The best fish could be found at Frank’s Seafood on Newton Street, she said. At the Greystone Voter’s League building, renowned musicians Ray Charles and B.B. King performed. On Sundays, many folks worshipped at the Greater Providence Baptist Church.

“Newton Street was basically where everything was in Algiers,” said Ragas, president of the Riverview Civic Association.

Yet in the decades since her youth, pockets of blight have taken over Newton and most of the neighborhood with boarded up bars, shoe shine stores and restaurants that are in disrepair.

With two impending developments under way nearby, Old Algiers residents and business owners are discussing the possible rebirth of Newton Street as a thriving corridor of commercial and residential activity. The Old Algiers Main Street Corporation, which is a nonprofit business group, and residents say they want to prepare themselves for the influx of money and new residents who are expected to settle in the community once the massive federal city project at the Naval Support Activity base opens, and Blaine Kern’s riverfront development of apartments, retail stores and a hotel also comes online.

Federal city would consolidate military and government offices at the 193-acre base, while Kern wants to develop as many as 1,500 apartments and possibly a cruise ship terminal between the Crescent City Connection and Opelousas Avenue in Algiers Point. Phase one of Kern’s project awaits zoning approval from New Orleans officials and could break ground within 60 days of receiving that approval.

Meanwhile, construction on federal city must begin by a federally mandated deadline of Sept. 30, 2008.

Last week, Main Street and residents began developing a vision for their neighborhood.

While the group has long discussed revitalizing major corridors in the area, such as Opelousas Avenue and Newton Street, Main Street President Valerie Robinson said federal city and the Kern project shifted Newton Street into prominence because of its proximity to both sites. The developments also will guarantee an economic investment in the Algiers community as a whole, she said.

“It’s important for us to be involved in getting what we need and what we want from these developments,” she said.

Most of the organization’s efforts toward helping the community has been in the form of $10,000 in grants to businesses looking to improve the exterior of buildings along targeted streets. The grants are a maximum of $1,000 each, and funding must be matched by business owners.

Sherry and Charles Desvignes, who own The Blessed Place Pharmacy, said that attracting new businesses needs to be among the priorities for the community, since growth has been sporadic in the four years they’ve been on Newton Street. Although the couple does not live in Old Algiers, they said they located their business there because of the affordability of the property and the expectation that the area would grow.

They admitted that they’ve been disappointed with the lack of progress, particularly after Hurricane Katrina, and hoped the meeting would produce some tangible results.

Robinson said the group plans to compile the suggestions from residents and businesses owners as well as conduct a market study on business needs for the area. Some of the goals mentioned included improved landscaping along the roadway, development that focused on encouraging walking or biking, community cleanup campaigns and improving signage in the community.

In addition, Main Street is working on a database of available properties on Newton.

Myles Cooper, who owns a business center that houses a beauty salon, T-shirt shop and package center on Newton, said he wants to see a return to the “mom-and-pop walking corridor.” He said he’d also like to see an emphasis on the positives of the historic district.

“I think that if we can come together as a community and really rally around the businesses . . . Newton Street can and will be what it once was,” Cooper said.

Longtime resident Troy Hogans said it has been sad watching the mom-and-pop stores that once dominated Newton close their doors. While growth is important, he said the area must maintain its character. An influx of big-box stores, or chain stores that do not retain the look of Old Algiers would be a detriment to the “quaint” neighborhood, he said.

“I would like to kind of keep that old-time community,” Hogans said. “Change is great, but we don’t want to change it too much.”

Allen Powell II can be reached at apowell@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3793.

BOSTON, March 1 — A plan to demolish a 1960 office tower by the influential architect Paul Rudolph threatens to pit a prominent developer backed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino against preservationists who see the building as a seminal example of midcentury Modernism.

If the developer, Steve Belkin, prevails, Mr. Rudolph’s 13-story structure will be supplanted by an 80-story skyscraper designed by one of today’s biggest names, the Italian architect Renzo Piano.

On March 13 the Boston Landmarks Commission plans to consider Mr. Belkin’s application for a demolition permit for the Rudolph building, at 133 Federal Street, in the city’s financial district. The commission, whose jurisdiction covers all buildings in downtown Boston and in other neighborhoods more than 50 years old, can order a 90-day delay during which it can ask the applicant to consider alternatives to demolition.

Several groups, including Docomomo, an international organization devoted to preserving Modernist buildings, plan to submit statements at the hearing urging the commission to recommend that the city delay issuing the permit by 90 days.

“We are not opposed to the new development, but we would like to think there is a solution that could accommodate the preservation of Mr. Rudolph’s building,” David Fixler, president of Docomomo’s New England branch, said. “It is a very significant piece of Boston’s architectural heritage and deserves a complete hearing.”

Similar battles to prevent demolition of Rudolph residences have been unsuccessfully waged in Sarasota, Fla., and Westport, Conn., in recent years; preservationists are now fighting to save his Riverview High School in Sarasota.

The squat tower in Boston, originally called the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building, was the first Modernist office building to rise in this city’s downtown, according to Docomomo. Its ornately intricate concrete exterior was viewed as a controversial rejoinder to the prevailing International Style of the 1950s, in which high-rises were typically wrapped in glass.

Currently owned by Mr. Belkin’s company, Trans National Properties, it is part of the Winthrop Square redevelopment, whose biggest portion is occupied by a city-owned parking garage. At the urging of Mayor Menino, Mr. Belkin submitted the sole proposal in November to build the 80-story tower on the site. Preliminary drawings for the Piano tower call for it to be topped by a “lookout garden” and to strive for certification as an environmentally sensitive green building. Also planned are an adjoining covered plaza and an indoor public garden. The board of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which must approve projects larger than 20,000 square feet, endorsed the proposal in late January with Mr. Piano in attendance. The developer has until April 25 to submit a financing plan to the authority.

James W. Hunt, chief of environmental and energy services for the city, said that Mayor Menino was committed to the Piano tower. “It furthers his vision of Boston becoming a contemporary architecture hub,” he said.

But preservationists argue that the Rudolph building need not be sacrificed to make way for the Piano tower. Ideally, they say, the 1960 structure might even enter into a visual dialogue with a bold new tower.

In this month’s issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Timothy M. Rohan, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says the building received a mixed reception upon its completion. It drew praise from the architect Philip Johnson and later from the architectural historian Vincent J. Scully Jr., who applauded its “excellent relationship to the pre-existing street” and said it prefigured the progressive urbanist schemes of Alison and Peter Smithson in London.

But Architectural Forum called the building “one of the most controversial structures put up in the U.S. in some time.”

Unlike many of his Modernist peers, Mr. Rohan said in an interview, Mr. Rudolph “felt the need to respond to the mainly 19th-century historic styles then surrounding the site.”

“He thus decided against a glass-paneled facade, opting for this richly detailed but still Modern shell,” he said. “In this appreciation of urban context, he was far ahead of his time.”

Some architecture enthusiasts detect a paradox. For them, Mr. Rudolph’s architectural experiment offers parallels to some of Mr. Piano’s early triumphs, like the 1977 Pompidou Center in Paris (designed with Richard Rogers), with its exposed mechanical systems.

Many of the precast concrete piers that line the exterior of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building, for example, are hollow to accommodate the building’s engineering systems, including its heating and cooling. “By moving the structural systems to the exterior, he added to the spaciousness and flexibility of the interior,” Mr. Rohan said.

Mr. Fixler of Docomomo said: “There is a spirit of structural and system experimentation associated with the Rudolph building that is very close to Renzo Piano’s. If it could be saved, it would make a good neighbor to his tower.”

In an interview, Mr. Piano said he wanted his tower to have a “light presence,” hovering above the proposed 70-foot-high public plaza. Without the vast open space, he said, his tower will seem too aggressive, and only demolition of the Rudolph building will make that wide plaza possible.

“I am a great admirer of Rudolph’s and I always ask myself, ‘Can we try to keep a building as a piece of architectural memory?’ ” he said. “But if it is not demolished, we lose the opportunity to create a city square.”

Yet Mr. Piano added that he was under pressure from Mr. Belkin to increase the tower’s width, something he said he could not agree to do. That conflict leaves the project’s outcome even more unclear.

Mr. Piano also designed the new headquarters of The New York Times Company, which is scheduled to open this spring.

In a letter he plans to submit to the Landmarks Commission, Mr. Rohan points out that in 1986 Mr. Rudolph was hired by a former owner of 133 Federal Street to produce a plan for developing that site. Mr. Rudolph, who died in 1997, proposed doubling the building’s size, an idea never realized.

One solution, Mr. Rohan suggested, “might be to use Rudolph’s schemes as the inspiration for the expansion rather than demolition of the structure.”

Asia’s growing air pollution — billowing plumes of soot, smog and wood smoke — is making the Pacific region cloudier and stormier, disrupting winter weather patterns along the West Coast and into the Arctic, researchers reported Monday.

Carried on prevailing winds, the industrial outpouring of dust, sulfur, carbon grit and trace metals from booming Asian economies is having an intercontinental cloud-seeding effect, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is the first large-scale analysis to draw a link between Asian air pollution and the changing Pacific weather patterns.

“The pollution transported from Asia makes storms stronger and deeper and more energetic,” said lead author Renyi Zhang at Texas A&M University. “It is a direct link from large-scale storm systems to [human-produced] pollution.”

Satellite measurements reveal that high-altitude storm clouds over the northern Pacific have increased up to 50% over the last 20 years as new factories, vehicles and power plants in China and India spew growing amounts of microscopic pollutant particles into the air.

The resulting changes have altered how rain droplets form and helped foster the creation of imposing formations over the northern Pacific known as deep convective clouds.

The clouds create powerful updrafts that spawn fiercer thunderstorms and more intense rainfall, particularly during the winter, the researchers said.

Only a decade ago did scientists in the University of California’s Pacific Rim Aerosol Network help discover that the pollution crossing the Pacific from Asia was worse than suspected, with millions of tons of previously undetected contaminants carried on the wind.

In fact, on any spring or summer day, almost a third of the air high over Los Angeles, San Francisco and other California cities can be traced directly to Asia, researchers said.

“More stuff starting up over there means more stuff ending up over here,” said UC Davis atmospheric scientist Steven Cliff.

Usually, dust and industrial pollutants take from five days to two weeks to cross the Pacific to California.

Zhang and his colleagues conducted their three-year study by comparing satellite imagery of the Pacific region taken from 1984 to 1994 with imagery of the same area from 1994 to 2005. The study, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, found that deep convective clouds had increased between 20% and 50%.

Convective clouds include cumulonimbus clouds, which can be many miles thick with a base near Earth’s surface and a top frequently at an altitude of 33,000 feet or more.

The research team, which included atmospheric scientists from Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UC San Diego, linked the changing cloud patterns to the increasing pollution through a series of computer studies.

The scientists also examined satellite data from the Atlantic region during the same periods, since pollution from North America follows the prevailing winds to Europe. But they did not find any similar pattern of cloud changes or increase in storm intensity.

The Pacific pollution also may affect other pervasive patterns of air circulation that shape world climate.

“If the trend to intensified storms in this region persists, it will likely have profound implications on climate change,” said Robert McGraw, a senior atmospheric chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, who was not involved in the study.

Among other consequences, the more energetic Pacific storm track could be carrying warmer air and more black soot farther north into the Canadian Arctic, where it may accelerate the melting of polar ice packs, the researchers said.

The researchers emphasized that it would take much more sustained study to understand the international climate ramifications.

Until recently, most scientists believed that, with its adverse effects on health and plant life, such aerosol pollution was mostly a local problem. If anything, it helped rather than hindered the climate — at least in terms of global warming — by offsetting the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

At low altitudes, the haze of aerosol particles reflects the sun’s energy back into space, cooling Earth’s surface slightly. At the same time, the particles help form brighter low-altitude clouds that also shield the surface from solar heat.

But once these tiny particles reach the upper atmosphere, they generate fierce downpours from super-cooled droplets and ice particles instead of gentle warm showers.

At monitoring sites along the U.S. West Coast, scientists have been detecting pollutants that originated from smokestacks and tailpipes thousands of miles to the west.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington have captured traces of ozone, carbon monoxide, mercury and particulate matter from Asia at monitoring sites on Mt. Bachelor in Oregon and Cheeka Peak in Washington state.

Cliff and his colleagues have been picking up the telltale chemical signatures of Asian particulates and other pollutants at several monitoring sites north of San Francisco and, during the last year, around Southern California.

The pollutants, however, are suspended at high altitude. It is unclear how much of them reach ground level or what their direct effect on local weather might be.

“The air above Los Angeles is primarily from Asia,” Cliff said. “Presumably that air has Asian pollution incorporated into it.”

BANGKOK — Black smoke billowing from tailpipes into the humid, tropical air was once a Bangkok trademark. But a decade and a half after Thailand began a battle for better air quality, this erstwhile icon of smog has emerged as a role model for pollution-choked capitals in Asia, with considerably cleaner air than Beijing, Jakarta, New Delhi and Shanghai.

Some buses here still belch toxic vapor. Yet the skies in Bangkok on most days are blue, thanks to the work of a small, dedicated group of people. They have pressed the case for cleaner air despite a history of weak, short-lived governments and the country’s current efforts to extricate itself from the tangled results of the military coup last September.

 

“There’s a huge difference when you walk around the streets,” said Jitendra Shah, a coordinator at the World Bank for environment and social issues in Southeast Asia who has worked in Bangkok since the 1990s. “Breathing is definitely easier.”

Thailand’s battle against air pollution provides a virtual how-to manual of environmental cleanup, say Mr. Shah and other air quality experts in Asia. Thai officials cajoled oil companies to produce cleaner fuel, used higher taxes to phase out the once ubiquitous two-stroke motorcycles and converted taxis to run on clean-burning liquefied petroleum gas. They overcame lobbying campaigns from large, mostly Japanese-owned, car companies and imposed progressively stricter emissions controls based on European norms. Thailand had no emissions standards before 1992.

The local government enacted simple but highly effective measures like washing the streets to keep the dust down. Buddhist crematoriums around the city were urged to change from wood-burning pyres to more sophisticated electric incinerators.

One striking result is that, while the number of motor vehicles registered in Bangkok has increased 40 percent over the past decade, the average levels of the most dangerous types of pollution — small dust particles that become embedded in the lungs — have been cut 47 percent, to 43 micrograms per cubic meter from 83.

Bangkok’s air, on average, now falls within the limit set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency of 50 micrograms per cubic meter, but is above the European Union limit of 40. The World Health Organization guidelines are 20 micrograms per cubic meter.

Four decades ago, Thailand did not have a word for pollution — there was barely use for it in a city with far fewer cars than there are now. It was only in 1976 that the Royal Institute, the official arbiter of the Thai language, coined the word “mollapit.” It means “poison or toxins that come from impurity or dirtiness,” according to Naiyana Wara-aswapati, a senior linguist at the institute.

Giving pollution a name was far easier than cleaning the air. And as pedestrians in Bangkok can attest, some of the poison still lingers. The city still has nagging air quality problems, especially and paradoxically in neighborhoods served by the city’s relatively new mass transit system, which was supposed to help ease pollution by allowing commuters to leave their cars at home.

Pollutants, trapped beneath the concrete platforms of the elevated railway, can rise to levels that rival those of the dirtiest cities in Asia: 85 to 180 micrograms per cubic meter of dust particles.

Greater Bangkok, with a population of about 10 million, has not yet achieved the air quality of Singapore or Tokyo. Those cities have on average the cleanest air of any major Asian capital, roughly equivalent to that of New York City. But what Bangkok has shown is that it is not necessary to have Singapore’s authoritarian legacy or Tokyo’s riches to make radical improvements.

Part of Bangkok’s success in cleaning its air is a result of luck and geography. Unlike Los Angeles, Bangkok has no surrounding mountains to trap smog. Unlike Beijing, which has some of the worst air in East Asia, power plants around Bangkok do not use coal. Thailand gets natural gas from neighboring Myanmar and its own platforms in the Gulf of Thailand; 70 percent of the country’s power production is from natural gas, which burns more cleanly than coal.

Most of the credit for the cleaner air, however, goes to a group of strong-willed environmental pioneers, said Nuntavarn Vichit-Vadakan, dean of the faculty of public health at Thammasat University. The group, many of them trained in the United States, convinced politicians of the need for action, Mr. Nuntavarn said.

They faced considerable resistance. Supat Wangwongwatana, director general of the pollution control department at the Ministry of Environment, helped usher in Thailand’s first laws on tailpipe emissions, based mainly on European standards. In the early 1990s, he traveled to Japan with Kasem Sanitwong Na Ayutthaya, the current environment minister, to persuade Japanese automakers to make and sell cleaner cars in Thailand.

Bhichit Rattakul, an American-trained microbiologist, created the Anti-Air Pollution & Environmental Protection Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, in 1986, before going green was trendy. Elected Bangkok’s governor in 1996, he planted 400,000 trees, cracked down on polluting trucks and established stricter rules for dusty construction sites.

In 1991, Piyasvasti Amranand, a former secretary general of the National Energy Policy Office, established Thailand’s first comprehensive plan to remove lead, sulfur and other harmful chemicals from fuel. Mr. Piyasvasti, who is now energy minister, said he encountered strong resistance from Western oil companies and Japanese car manufacturers; he recalled long debates over the proposed introduction of catalytic converters, the devices that neutralize harmful chemicals before they are emitted from tailpipes.

On the streets of Bangkok, residents give the city’s fight against pollution mixed reviews.

Pacharapun Tinnabal, 25, a graduate student who recently returned after living for three years in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, said she was relieved to return home because the air there was “far more polluted.”

But others, like Thongpoon Nawiman, a 41-year-old motorcycle messenger who spends five days a week wending through Bangkok’s wide boulevards and tiny alleys, are not satisfied. “The air is still polluted, and the traffic is still bad,” he said.

Mr. Bhichit, the former Bangkok governor, agrees that there is a lot of room for improvement.

“I’m still not a happy man,” he said. “I’m trying to demand more.”

Patcharin Areewong and Warangkana Tempati contributed reporting.

John King;

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

One of them is Rem Koolhaas, who stopped by San Francisco last week for a lecture filled with cynical wit and visual flash. He also stirred my doubts about the entire global game — where the stars often seem to work harder at one-upping their rivals than at creating buildings that will improve our cities and lives.

 ”Architecture has to become more extravagant, more exceptional, more unique to play its assumed role as icon,” said Koolhaas, 62, black-clad and droll. “I’m never quite sure if I’m supposed to present an intellectual discourse or be a salesman. The line between is very thin.”

Koolhaas is best known in these parts for a building that never was: the Prada he designed for a corner near Union Square, a 10-story boutique clad in bead-blasted steel, with 8,000 portholes instead of windows.

It resembled a cheese grater and it infuriated people who said it shouldn’t be in the architectural conservation district around Union Square. But the City Planning Commission gave Prada its blessing in 2001 — just in time for the economy to tank.

Koolhaas didn’t mention Prada in his 90-minute presentation Wednesday to the crowd in a comically overstuffed auditorium at San Francisco Art Institute. Why should he? The work of his Office for Metropolitan Architecture is pushing in directions that make Prada’s provocation seem nostalgically quaint.

For instance, there’s the tower being built for China’s television headquarters. The design is best likened to a sharp-edged Mobius strip; the client Koolhaas shrugged off with a laconic “many architects today are accused of building for evil.”

Another endeavor involves the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Koolhaas’ approach to this cluster of buildings that dates to 1754 is to “completely abstain from architecture” — even leaving visible evidence of structural decay — because “we want to preserve the building, but also the history of its neglect.”

When not sharing his own work, Koolhaas drew laughs by dissecting the strangeness of an age where a handful of architectural celebrities — Zaha, Renzo, Frank, Rem — are sought out by institutions and developers who hope to make a splash.

“We have no income, but people are very interested in us,” Koolhaas said. “A competition means you’re usually with your 10 best friends” — each in pursuit of the commission and acclaim.

All of which makes for great gossip when paths cross at the international terminal, I’m sure. What bothers me is the detached unreality of a world where architecture is reduced to a chic parlor game. At some point the stars aren’t designing for the site or the client. They want to pull a new breed of rabbit out of their hat.

The newest project Koolhaas showed off is a 52-story tower unveiled on the East Coast two days before the lecture. It would stand in Jersey City across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan — and I say stand instead of soar because there’s nothing romantic about the concept of two rectangular slabs balanced on top of a boxy mid-rise, with the piece in the middle set perpendicular to the ones above and below.

Essentially it’s a stack of packing crates: one filled with a hotel, one with apartments and one with lofts.

Koolhaas described the design as pragmatic common sense: “There’s a financial logic to every one of these dimensions.” But the real thrust seems to be a riposte at the box-popping exhibitionism seen in the towers proposed during the past few years — sinuous forms that strut like runway models through architectural magazines.

Those forms are also all the rage in let-’er-rip boomtowns like Dubai — where Koolhaas was invited to compete in one project and showed up with images of a 600-foot-wide by 900-foot-tall slab.

It harks back to the art world of the 1960s, when minimalism came on the scene as a reaction to the excesses of abstract expressionism. Koolhaas wants to short-circuit spectacle in an odd way: by making a spectacle of simple forms.

Overall, it’s great that design novelty sells. I like the idea that decisionmakers see the value of challenging and innovative designs. Each time something dynamic appears on the landscape — including the library OMA fashioned in downtown Seattle, with its top-floor reading room that feels like a glass tree house — we see how architecture can reshape the world.

But today’s craze for gargantuan novelty has a dangerous side.

No matter how seductive images might be as images, or as models on display, buildings aren’t sculptures in a gallery. Nor are they rhetorical flourishes in a cultural debate.

Buildings are real life — that’s their beauty and threat. If they’re overwhelming on the ground, or deadening to views, we passers-by won’t know the “artistic” context. We’ll just know they shouldn’t be there. And by then it will be too late.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.