I asked my developer friend if there's a name for the tactic of buying a partly-attractive property and letting it to stand there for years deteriorating. Letting the rain and the dust and the hoodie vandals get into it, smash the windows, tag the concrete and make a mess. Allowing it to become an eyesore. Letting it go to shit. So people defending it look stupid. So the neighbors want it gone.

"Yeah," she said, "it's called....", then gave me a smart-aleck answer not worth repeating.

You could call it "eyesoring" (doesn't sound right) or "malign neglect" (nah). If Don King and Ada Louis Huxtable had had a love child he might have already coined "Deteriorvation" or "Vandalstruction" or "Neglectification" (I've gone with that one).

Whatever you call it, according to the smart-aleck answer and other evidence, it's a standard tool in the developer's carpetbag of tricks and it happens all the time.

Now as of mid-February 2008, after five years of standing and deteriorating, the Mountain Bell building is now in real trouble.

The same lifelong struggle for glassy perfection, struggling with materials and proportions and technologies and clients, finally led Mies van der Rohe to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

The same lifelong struggle for glassy perfection lead I.M. Pei and Henry N. Cobb, on behalf of a whole generation of steel-and-glass modernists, to the John Hancock Tower (which really didn't turn out so well, but nevertheless).

To the guy on the street who has never drawn a building, never struggled with material choices and proportions, who doesn't understand the frustrations of trying to reconcile an architectural vision with the practical limitations of the real world, that guy doesn't understand how those frustrations can become sort of a game with fate where you can only win by raising the stakes to perfection. It's a challenge to the universe. It is hard to get to the simple glass box.

Unfortunately this philosophical struggle between the architect and the physical material constraints of the universe doesn't leave room at the table for the guy on the street. The guy on the street, he sees a simple glass box and thinks to himself, "Derrrrrr, anybody could do that." Or in other words, "It is a box, not architecture. A child could do as well."

And another ironic thing about these buildings that reach for perfection: that quest for perfection requires a lot of maintenance. One imperfection, they look compromised. And therefore a very good target for neglectification.

Like other examples of perfection there's simply not much to say about the building. What you see is what you get. Just like Beadle's Executive Towers and Sarmiento's Phoenix Financial Center, it was supposed to be twin towers. There are no luxury amenities or odd features inside. It is so well built, according to one of Beadle's one-time associates familiar with the building, that they'll have to cut it apart. The "word" is that there's an asbestos mitigation problem, and that's true, but not unusual.

Also as reported in the February 1 2008 Arizona Republic (a separate piece), a San Diego developer is going to tear it down and replace it with high-end condos -- senior condos this time. " ' The plan is to develop a very high-end, five-star retirement living community on that 9-acre piece of land,' said Joe Pinsonneault, developer of Montage Senior Living." It's Mr. Pinsonneault who's been holding the property all this time.

Mountain Bell stands (by design) on a nice, big, juicy greenfield near downtown and has been left to deteriorate, very much on purpose. Weary sarcasm doesn't seem appropriate.