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There’s always been something a little hypothetical about this project, which was announced in July 2005 and which a lot of local developers doubt will ever come off. A new developer, Garrett Kelleher of Dublin, asked Calatrava for a redo that dropped the broadcast antenna, dropped the hotel component, and nearly tripled the number of condos. Kamin thinks Calatrava, “a superb architect by nearly everybody’s measure,” can come up with something better and will — if Kelleher and the city push him.
And Martin Filler wrote a long, careful essay on Calatrava in the New York Review of Books, where he remarked on Calatrava’s “preference for bravura effect at the expense of function,” his “shallow symbolism” and “underlying sentimentality.” Filler quoted a Buffalo tourism official on his city’s architectural attractions: “You need awesome, you really do, because these other cities are doing awesome.”
