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Starchitecture Sullied!

The hits just keep coming for Renzo Piano's MePa Whitney. Filing today is Bloomberg archicritic James Russell, who brings back the ship metaphors ("The latest design?looks like a top-heavy container ship run aground") and argues that Piano would have been better off with his original design, "a towering silhouette in sloping, stone-faced prismatic facets." Instead, "he squished the building’s bulk into a clumsy sandwich of vertical and horizontal boxes. How could this evocative collision of city and river have defeated him? Perhaps he is too busy. He also afflicted us New Yorkers with the awkward expansion of the Morgan Library & Museum." [Bloomberg]