Nicolai Ouroussoff seems to be celebrating restraint in his review of the Standard, a new hotel on 13th St. in NYC:
These are simple but powerful moves. And they are a reminder that enveloping a structure in a flamboyant wrapper is not always the most effective way to create lasting architecture. In the wrong hands, too much creative freedom can be outright dangerous.
With the Standard Hotel, Polshek Partnership joins a handful of other midlevel firms that are beginning to find the right balance between innovation and restraint.
That’s a pleasant change from his past rambles (here’s a good one), so maybe the New Austerity is having an impact on his work.
Meanwhile, this writer for this Reuters article on the MGM CityCenter project in Las Vegas must have had a hard time not chortling when he recorded this passage —
“The events of the last six months have been our Pearl Harbor, economically,” said Bill Thompson, gaming expert and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “CityCenter might be too big to fail. If it opens, it’s a dramatic gesture that says we’re winning, we’re not defeated, we’re on the way back.”
“If it fails, it would be like a second Pearl Harbor.”
— about a 67-acre condo/hotel/casino/shopping mall complex. I think it’s very funny that a professor of public administration at UNLV is referred to first as a “gaming expert,” because it implies (to me) that he’s a compulsive gambler.
I couldn’t understand anything Nicolai Ouroussoff was writing… if it wasn’t for your post I’m not sure I would have know what it was about.
He reminds me of the clips I’ve seen on The Soup of that crazy Spanish judge on Dancing With The Stars. In fact, I’m going to go back and read Ouroussoff’s stuff in that accent now.