It might be the weirdest building in New York City. It's laughable, unforgettable, and currently vacant. It could be a Turkish telephone central office. It could have dropped from the sky. And it could be gone very soon.

It is conspicuous. Partly because of location, in the dish of Columbus Circle seen as far up north as the Natural History Museum, look back down Central Park West - there is it, a Kevin Lynch-style landmark. And partly because of its look. It's a squat, oriental-looking fellow, of puzzling aspect, the sort of chap that gets your mind busy figuring him out. Why won't he look at me? What year is this thing? Hard to know. What style is it? What's going on in that top arcade? Is this a water tower? Is this a joke, or a riddle?

And then there's the unavoidable next conclusion. It is damn sure useless.

The building is 2 Columbus Circle, commissioned by Huntington Hartford and designed by Edward Durell Stone in 1964. In architectural history, Stone is known as the modernist who broke free from the aesthetic straitjacket of Modernism - in other words, treated as a vulgar traitor among the architectural establishment - and allowed ornament and a certain joy back on his buildings.

Reportedly it was his new Latin wife that awoke this change in him. This is Wallace K. Harrison on Ed Stone, from the Newhouse biography. "Stone was a true Southerner, with a beautiful sense of life in general: he was a friend of William Faulkner, who helped him out on a number of occasions. Unfortunately, he had two handicaps; he drank too much and he had an erratic second wife who influenced him to do all those perforated walls - all that damned stuff."

This took a certain amount of courage. You'd hope that such a ballsy, in-your-face gesture to the parsimonious, straitjacketed Modernist crowd of 1964 would have been a brilliant success.... but no such luck. It was a wet firecracker. Conceived as an art museum for a misguided client, the building has never been practical for any use.

It was a strong gesture, sure, and brave. But tragically and ironically, not a good building.

Although once superbly detailed inside, it's obviously windowless, a hopeless case for adaptive reuse as a hotel or offices. A guy could suffocate in there. Its age and size make it undesirable. Not only is it an eccentric windowless box, it also stands on its own odd little block and is hard to get to. As the topper, it is split-level inside, half-floors with broad stair/ramps between, and the very floorplan, with all its expensive wooden paneling and bronze trim, exists as a cruel taunt to those who only wanted to help her.

It's like she doesn't want to be helped.

You can't even puncture holes in the exterior walls to let light in; those are load-bearing concrete slab walls, that's how he attained the curve. Once there was a mysterious and luxurious ninth-floor Polynesian restaurant called the Gauguin Room, which had spectacular views of Central Park, that was what occupied that two-story loggia at the top.

But that was then.

Hartford ran it extravagantly for awhile in the mid- to late-sixties (which makes me wonder if Yayoi Kusama was ever there), then dropped it off on someone. Kicked from owner to owner for 40 years, released by Viacom to the city of New York for $10, the Department of Cultural Affairs ran it as an information center for awhile. But with the southwest corner of Central Park, with the Trump Property, the Time Warner Center and its big draw, the basement supermarket, the city wanted something done about its liability. Namely, skin it, straighten out the flooring issues, and use it.

Then came the howling.

Tom Wolfe loudly defended Stone's virtues in a 2-part NYT opinion piece (October 12 and 13, 2003) on anti-Modernist grounds. He and the building go way back. He was there defending it when it was born, in 1964, in an article reprinted in his collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, and he is funny when deflating academic architectural language, like a cackling bad teen you hung out with. But Wolfe's argument for preserving 2 Columbus Circle boils down to (to borrow Bob Dole's cadence for a minute):

a) Tom Wolfe likes it
b) Tom Wolfe is used to it
c) it was a slap in Modernism's face, and that makes Tom Wolfe smile

Tom Wolfe finds a lot of virtues associated with this building, but he never directly claims that it is either beautiful or useful. What does his authority then rest on? His superior feelings about it? Is it a matter of taste, then? What is that beeping I hear? What kind of truck? Oh, look at all the yellow tape all the sudden. -- Hey!

All of the talk in front of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, from the aesthetic defense written by Robert A. M. Stern to the weak reasoning within the suits filed by preservationist organizations, none of that addresses the difficulty of making this place useable. Their feelings were that they liked the building and were used to the building, not that it was beautiful, nor could it ever be used, but it somehow deserved to graze at the edge of Central Park forever.