When the skyscraper art was new, no one knew what the hell to do with it. They just piled one floor on top of the other, slathered the facades with ersatz classical details, and put out the FOR RENT sign. Eventually the theorists came along - Sullivan, Wright, Corbu, Mies - and each helped shape how their era thought about the tall building as an object of art as well as commerce. But one of the earliest criticisms of the nascent art form was its inability to reconcile the thing itself - a vertical object of steel and glass - with the facade that covered it. The goal was a building that didn’t just wear its skin, but inhabited it. The buildings we revere the most are the ones that seem complete and true to themselves - the Flatiron, for example. It’s the Popeye of early skyscrapers. It is what it is.

This proposal may delight judges eyes because it’s an example of a trend that trashes the old ideas. Buildings are no longer objects designed to impart a single idea, they are simply frameworks on which you can hang ideas like so many Christmas ornaments or Post-It Notes. In this respect architecture is beginning to resemble painting in the post Abstract-Expressionist era - what it looks like is less important than the theory it manifests. The discordancy of this design suggests that the theory involved is very important, and has many serious adherents in Germany who wear turtlenecks and smoke a lot.

You don’t look at this building and think New York. For this site, at this time, that is unacceptable. If I’d been on the judging committee I wouldn’t have let this one past the first cut.

The skyscraper is an iconic object; say the word and people get a specific picture - and it’s not some blunt Brobdignagian upended crackerbox. They think Empire State; they think Chrysler. Why?

Neither of those buildings could be described as traditional - the Empire State Building awes you with its mass, not its subtle detail. The Chrysler’s swarming ornamentation is modern, but it relates to people’s lives - those are hubcaps and radiator caps up there, for heaven’s sake. And it was made of brick - realize it or not, whenever you see a big brick building you register the fact that this thing was made by hand. In the end, though, it’s the top of both buildings that snags in your mind - Empire is crowned with a gigantic Moderne penis (well, it is) and the Chrysler geysers out that fantasia of chrome and light, of circles and triangles, culminating in a slender mast that tapers to the point of a phonograph needle and hands off the job to the sky itself. At sunset the light ignites the top of the building like few others. There’s a reason people love it: it loves them back. You get joy out of looking at the Chrysler building. Damn, it’s big - and it must have seemed so much bigger when it was built, too. But it’s made by humans for humans, and the individual is still the unit on which it was based. To stand at night on 42nd street, looking up at the sculptures atop Grand Central Station, and see the Chrysler down the street - well, you know where you are. Turn around and stare up at the Philip Morris tower, and you could be anywhere.

So it takes drama, the right materials, a sense of the street, a love of the sky and the ability to get from down here to up there with confidence and skill. And it takes something else, an indefinable quality that makes a space work. Think of Rockefeller Center - aside from a few details on the ground floor, those buildings just go up like a mountain range. On a Saturday afternoon you can’t get through the plaza without a taser gun. What draws people here? It’s not just the big Banana Republic store. It’s the RCA building that electrifies the project, and it’s one of the most ingenious designs ever conceived. For starters, it’s one of the few buildings in New York that actually mimics the layout of its city - the east-wide side is broad and long, the north-south view narrow. It’s like the God of the Grid. The cascading setbacks sculpt the form in that rational romantic style that seems to characterize the era. It almost looks like something left behind by a race of Giants. The building’s energy works both ways - it reaches up with calm confidence, but it also pours down with great force into that small ice rink, igniting the statue of Prometheus, splashing off the buildings that ring the plaza. It’s gargantuan, it’s intimate; it’s dense, it’s open.

One of the greatest architects of the era was Raymond Hood, who also worked on two modern icons - the Daily News building, which was a glass of cold water in the face, and the gorgeous McGraw Hill building, which isn’t much known outside of New York. (It’s up there with the Chrysler, in my book.) But he was adept at classical styles; his American Radiator building still overlooks Bryant Park, and it’s another one of my favorites. Black stone, gold crown. He was not an innovator, but he captured the essence of a style and distilled it into the best possible expression.

If only we could bring him back to life and give him this job. I think I know what he’d do - it would be restrained, severe, symmetrical, and it would strike the sky like two great swords.