The new Hunters Point Community Library erected in Queens is like a caricature of Gustav Peichl’s most lurid and unsightly creations — a significant charge when one considers Piechl’s fondness for actual caricature. It’s as if disorder and discord had a $40 million lovechild, and the poor orphaned bastard sits face up, right there on the East River for all of the borough — indeed, the world — to see. It’s ill-proportioned and painfully asymmetric. The New York Times, in one of their more predictable editorial positions, deemed the monstrosity “one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century.”


Just look at this thing.

New York is full of beautiful architecture, from the ornament of Grand Central Station, to the gothic spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and even Richardson’s Romanesque towers on Olmsted and Vaux’s pastoral landscape; this pitiable creation in Queens is, by contrast, an eyesore. Would that the Times had some taste.