… when the first review Nicky writes in over a month is of a series of speculative competition entries in, um, Sweden. Which is lovely and all, and the land of our forefathers, but awfully far away and isn’t a competition sort of playtime? That’s kind of like a food critic disappearing for more than thirty days and then re-appearing with a paean to marsupial blood sausage, kind of like a music critic taking off for just a touch beyond four weeks and returning with a triumphant ode to a mechanical greeting card’s rendition of the Paper Planes remix, kind of like if we were to just stop blogging for twenty-eight (give or take a few) days and come back fully loaded with Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Book Proposal.

Just in case we weren’t clear: it’s a bad sign when the New York Times architecture critic doesn’t write anything about an existing building for quite some time, and then finally checks in with a round of imaginary criticism on five entirely imaginary projects. To be fair, the criticism is trenchant—Foster might not be as good a planner as he is an architect!—and timely—firms founded in the internet era are different from the behemoths of yore!—and vague—“the rest of the proposals fall somewhere between those extremes”—and so fully in the usual Ouroussoff ballpark, but the whole thing’s just a little weird.

The review’s got a few of those nice moments typical of Big Nick, where he takes a small detail like the corner of a building and writes about how it looks and what that means, and also does smashing-down lines like one where he calls a series of bridges “unimaginative.”

And then he just falls asleep. Seriously. All of that criticism, all of those years of thinking about architecture, all of that wielding of the position’s incredible power leads to… this:

But whatever you may think of the individual designs, the range of ideas presented here will be instructive for American urban planners entering an era of potential policy change. Government cash is nice. But we also need government to support fresh and innovative thinking about cities.

OMG! Stop! No! Shut the front door! No one (except for, er, everyone?) has said anything remotely like this! Are you suggesting, as you closing line, what we think you’re suggesting? That people should think about our totally insane situation in more innovative ways? That maybe our current approach to city-building isn’t working for us? We’re reeling here, incapable of imagining what might be coming next. Wait, wait, don’t tell us. We’re coming up with an over-under on a “Buildings are neat. Do them good.”

Bold Plans Prove That a City’s Future Needn’t Be Set in Concrete [New York Times]