New rendering of planned Park51 community center and mosque

The design of the controversial planned community center and mosque known as Park51 at 45 Park Place in TriBeCa has been attacked this week by Justin Davidson, the architecture critic of New York magazine, for a "vagueness that reflects a certain muddle about Park51's mission.

"When Park51 released a suite of renderings of the planned Islamic community center recently, the move seemed intended to neutralize the toxic verbiage swirling around the project with evidence of enlightened design. Instead, the images just added to the murk," Mr. Davidson wrote.

"They show a sugar-white fifteen-story building," the article continued, "slotted between sooty masonry relics. The facade is covered in a riff on a mashrabiya, the carved screen that in traditional Islamic architecture veils interiors from intrusive eyes and the penetrating sun. The motif of the six-point Arabic star has been fed through software to create an irregular pattern. Inside, escalators lead from a light-bathed upper story to an even airier mezzanine above, though we get no clue as to what those bare and generous spaces may be for. We could be looking at an airport or a hotel lobby."

The renderings were released by SOMA Architects, which is headed by Michel Abboud and has offices here and in Mexico City and Beirut. The article noted that "the firm's thin portfolio of built projects includes the Lebanese restaurant Naya in midtown, where white-on-white booths and perforated screens resemble pods for some chic scientific activity."

"In the absence of clarity," the article maintained, "Soma resorted to facile globalism. The facade invokes a series of Western architects' glosses on the mashrabiya more than it does the real thing--its most relevant antecedents are the elaborately patterned balcony screens in the new showcase enclave of Masdar in Abu Dhabi, designed by Norman Foster; the high-tech metal-and-glass curtain on Jean Nouvel's Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris; and the white concrete grille with which Edward Durrell Stone cloaked the front of his East Side brownstone. Park51's version yields a generic whiff of the Middle East, but ignores its immediate surroundings."

Mr. Davidson suggested that the architects "would make the logic of this location seem inescapable," adding that "they might have given more than a perfunctory nod to the financial district's modernist towers and ornate palazzos of capital or to the future complex rising a couple of blocks away. But instead of embedding the spirit of the place into the building, Soma has imagined a generically ornate box that could be dropped in another neighborhood - or work equally well as the offices of a software company in Cairo."

Mr. Davidson concluded that "the pictures are not encouraging," adding that "rather than use the opportunity to battle paranoia with precision, the nascent institution has chosen to crouch behind all-purpose, prerecession fanciness. Instead of taking a step toward reality, Park51 has proffered a decorative distraction, a picture to adorn a fund-raising brochure."

The suggestion that the architects should look about the site for contextual inspiration is not very cogent as the once iconic and romantic classicism of Lower Manhattan's skyline has long since been overtaken by Modernist boxiness that cries out for relief in the form of "decorative distraction."

The published design in the article, shown at the right from SOMA/Splash News/Newscom, in fact, might well be considered by some observers as very refreshing and lovely!