Too radical for NY? ... Gehry's IAC Building. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty
It has been compared to the sails of a yacht or the crisp pleats of a skirt, but to me Frank Gehry's new IAC headquarters in New York resembles nothing so much as a towering blancmange wobbling on a plate. I can just picture Gehry pensively prodding desserts in his studio with a Montblanc pen, surrounded by empty jelly moulds and time-lapse photographers.
Even so, critics have complained that it's rather dull and tame for a Gehry building. Is Gehry slumming it for the corporate buck? Or is the IAC building more a reflection of the city it's in? After all, Gehry has been trying to build something in New York for decades - a New York Times headquarters, an Ian Schrager hotel that looked like a statue in a sheet, a giant new Guggenheim - and more often than not, he's failed.
Is New York too conscious of its own iconic architectural image to accept a West Coast vulgarian like Gehry? This is, after all, the city that earlier this year turned down a proposal for a 30-storey apartment block designed by that notorious radical Norman Foster. Rem Koolhaas once described New York as "a city that obsessively measures its own pulse". If it carries on like this, it won't have one.
It's a dilemma for all historic cities, of course: do you respect the existing architectural order, or embrace change and keep moving? But New York in particular seems to have been in a process of fossilization for several decades now. Despite the cataclysm of 9/11, it feels more and more like a museum - a place where things used to happen but won't much any more. Will Gehry shake the city up? Or is he just wobbling his own jelly?
