There was such a fuss about adding a fourth tower to I M Pei’s three existing, landmarked Silver Towers at NYU that the plan was abandoned.  They’re considered modern masterpieces now, but when they were built in 1966 they stirred up the same kind of resentment that glass condo buildings stir up now.

In the 1970 Brian De Palma movie “Hi, Mom!” Robert De Niro plays an aspiring pornographer who lives in a crumbling walk-up across the street from one of the towers who films what he sees going on through the windows.  Eventually he joins forces with a band of revolutionaries to blow up the building, which they all consider a bastion of middle-class propriety.  That’s a notion that would be inconceivable now.

I watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” last night for the first time since I moved to New York over ten years ago.  The opening, a montage of shadowy, black-and-white views of the city, is lovely, but this shot of the Guggenheim made me gasp.

It’s shockingly simple and conveys so much: the slight slope of the ramp as you’re walking it, the relaxed voyeurism of the open balconies, and the jewel-box feeling of the museum at night.  It’s the gentlest, least heroic image I’ve seen of the museum, and the one that I want to keep with me.

Friday night on a panel about housing for the homeless two architects, Michael Maltzan and Jonathan Kirschenfeld, presented two very different approaches.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld, who works in New York, approaches city agencies and non profits to find suitable plots of land and secure funds to develop them.  The shelters he’s completed are simply, pragmatically conceived and finished in ordinary materials.  They are like the finest, most intelligent diagrams.  It’s as if he’s saying, This is all it takes to make housing.

Michael Maltzan, who works in Los Angeles, treats the city agencies and non profits he works with like any other clients, and the housing he builds for the homeless like any other housing.  The shelters that he’s completed have the same volumetric complexity and cinematic effects that his high-end houses do.  And why not?