Nicolai Ouroussoff Pens Demolition Wishlist

If wishes were wrecking balls…well, then Manhattan would have some gaping holes courtesy of Nicolai Ouroussoff (who wouldn’t look half-bad in a hard hat, we must say). The New York Times‘ Man on Buildings recently penned a demolition wish list for Gotham, because, Ouroussoff notes with a Dickensian flair, “Even the most majestic cities are pockmarked with horrors.” Although notable for its restraint when it comes to the AT&T building (“Its farcical Chippendale top was an instant hit, and a generation of architects grew up believing that any tower, no matter how cheap and badly designed, could be defended if you added a pretty fillip to the roof”), Ouroussoff’s list is both ruthless and amusingly annotated.