Right now generally, and this afternoon in particular, we’ve been looking to first things: the existential challenges faced by designers everywhere because, oh boo and hoo! the economic sh*t has hit the architectural fan. The prevailing assumption of most informed persons (including us, by and large) is that the weird, the wacky, and the wild must be cut away as unpardonable frippery—that an aesthetics of modesty, and an ethic of service, should be the primary objectives for architecture in the present environment. Criticism, it follows, should play sheepdog, corralling the profession against the possibility of recidivist extravagance. Onward and upward with the arts, huzzah, huzzah.

We do not believe we have heard any opinion to the contrary from New York’s Justin Davidson. Last time we met him, you may recall, he was tooling around East New York looking at subsidized housing. But yesterday he broke ranks, albeit after a strange fashion: Clucking his tongue at the imminent demolition of St. Vincent Hospital’s cussedly bizarre O’Toole Building in Greenwich Village (above), Davidson laments in particular the loss to the city of its architectural “weirdness”. He even follows the thread straight to Gehry’s IAC, imagining that one day it, too, could go the way of the O’Toole, another victim to the ever-accelerating blandification of the Manhattan streetscape.

Davidson digs weird, alright—there’s no other word for this hypothetical scenario of his. The odds of anybody tearing down IAC at any time, even in the deep future, is nil, plus or minus zero. Meanwhile, why is Davidson talking up glass and funkiness when we’re all going to pieces over bricks and mortar? Is he telling us there’s room for sentiment amidst the crisis? for meditations in an emergency?

St. Anywhere [New York]