The City Planning Commission maintained yesterday that Jean Nouvel's design for a major mixed-use skyscraper west of the Museum of Modern Art was 200 feet too high.

The building is a project of Hines Interests, which had arranged the transfer of air rights from the University Club and St. Thomas Episcopal Church, both on Fifth Avenue on the same block, and from other properties to permit the erection of a 1,250-foot-high, slanted tower with 150 luxury hotel rooms and 120 residential condominium apartments.

With its asymmetrical massing and robust angular bracing, the design promised to be a very impressive and very aggressive-looking new tower that would have been the tallest building in Manhattan north of the Empire State Building and therefore a very important and very prominent addition to the city's skyline.

The developer could have built a 1,050-foot-high tower "as-of-right" on the site without seeking special public approvals, but because it wanted a distinctive design and to maximize expansion potential for the Museum of Modern Art it sought a taller plan.

The decision by the City Planning Commission was surprising and not widely embraced.

In an article in article in today's edition of The New York Times, Nicholai Ouroussoff wrote that "Amanda Burden, the city planning commissioner, said the tower's top, which culminates in three uneven peaks, did not meet the aesthetic standards of a building that would compete in height with the city's most famous towers."

"The soaring height and slender silhouette of Mr. Nouvel's tower not only captured the spirit of Midtown - the energy and hubris that transformed this island into a monument to American cosmopolitanism - it also brought that spirit forcefully into the present," the article continued.

"The design's beauty," Mr. Ourossoff continued, "stemmed from its elegant proportions, particularly the exaggerated relationship between its small footprint and enormous height. Seen from the street, its receding facades would have induced a delicious sense of vertigo. Ms. Burden's objections were directed at the top of the building. 'Members of the commission had to make a decision based on what was in front of them,' she said. 'The development team had to show us that they were creating something as great or even greater than the Empire State Building and the design they showed us was unresolved.'"

It was not clear today what precedent the commission's position is based on as it is not written into the city's zoning that projects must be "as great or even greater than the Empire State Building." It would have been wonderful, of course, if such a regulation had been in effect since 1932.

In an article in today's edition of Architects Newspaper, Matt Chaban wrote that "'While the proposed design of the building is exemplary,' saod commission chairwoman Amanda Burden, 'the applicant has not made a convincing argument that the building's top 200 feet be worthy of the zone in which it would rise,'" adding that "the commission approved the building at a modified height of 1,050 feet by a vote of 9-0 with two abstentions." Mr. Chaban's article said that "George Lancaster, a spokesperson for Hines, declined to say what direction the developer would be taking, but made it clear that Hines was not giving up. 'We will soldier on,' Lancaster wrote in an email. 'It is not scrapped!'"

Mr. Ouroussoff properly lamented that "some people worry that nothing in our current age can measure up to the past," adding that "It is a mentality that, once it takes hold, risks transforming a living city into an urban mausoleum."