There’s a lot to see at MoMA right now, including the stunning Marina Abramovich retrospective and the Henri Cartier-Bresson show, but don’t miss Rising Currents in the architecture and design galleries. The show, which has its flaws, confronts head-on the impact that climate change will have on New York. Here’s my take in AN.

The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and cold stony fronts of the buildings. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and sharpening and silencing–everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and of the skyey space to the out-of-doors.”–Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I started reading Nicolai Ouroussoff’s Arts & Leisure piece on Toyo Ito, one of the most thoughtful and original architects working today, with a sense of anticipation that quickly changed to despondence. I hoped Ouroussoff, a highly uneven critic, would deliver one of his stronger pieces, such as his excellent call to save radical early Russian Modern architecture. The first sentence, when Ouroussoff referred to Ito as a having “cult following among architects,” worried me. While far from a household name, Ito is practicing at the highest level in the profession, so to characterize him as a cult figure seems inaccurate.

By the second paragraph, I knew where the piece was headed. “Mr. Ito has largely remained on the sidelines,” Ourroussoff writes. “He is rarely mentioned in conversations about semicelebrities like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, of Jacques Herzog.” Is that the standard by which architectural quality is to be judged? There are dozens of world-class architects who do not get mentioned in such conversations, and who has these conversations anyway? Architects and the architectural chattering class, for which Ouroussoff presumes to speak, don’t talk about architecture in such simplistic terms, so why does the critic with the largest popular readership in the country, if not the world, insist on perpetuating a phony star system?

But back to Ito. In addition to the throw away references to Hadid, Koolhaas, and Herzog, Ouroussoff makes the inevitable reference to Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, which bears little to no relevance to his discussion of Ito’s work. He makes an offensive reference to the great Tadao Ando, “whose brooding concrete structures have become a cliché of contemporary Japanese architecture.” Ando, a cliché? He is one of the master craftsman in the field who has taken a commonplace material to sublime new heights, seeing possibilities no one had before grasped. He is an equally gifted maker of forms. More importantly, however, the comparison to Ito is of little use as their work is so different in their use of materials, formal tendencies, spirit, and intention. The comparison is either ill-informed or a lazy effort on Ourroussoff’s part to contextualize Ito within the fascinating and rich world of contemporary Japanese architecture. To be fair, he does place cite the early influence of Kiyonori Kikutake and Kazuo Shinohara, but as contemporary comparisons, Shigeru Ban and Kazuo Sejima would at least be relevant for their shared interest in lightness and inventive forms that sometimes border on the whimsical.

Even more vexing is Ourroussoff’s vague praise of Ito’s work:

What his buildings do share is a distrust of simplistic formulas. His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.

His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.

Does this tell us anything about Ito’s work? Do we get a picture of it? Or this characterization:

…the inaccessibility of Mr. Ito’s architecture is a virtue. Hard to pin down, it is also difficult to brand. By embracing ambiguity, his work forces us to look at the world through a wider lens. It asks us to choose the slowly unfolding narrative over the instant fix.

While I applaud Ouroussoff’s attempt to bring the attention of a broader public to Ito’s work, his piece fails to make a persuasive case for Ito’s greatness. Meaningless claims like those above do little to advance the public’s understanding. Ito’s own words to the critic are much more helpful:

“I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies,” Mr. Ito lamented at one point during my visit. “Children don’t run around outside as much as they did. They sit in front of computer games. Some architects have been trying to find a language for this new generation, with very minimalist spaces. I am looking for something more primitive, a kind of abstraction that still has a sense of the body.”

“The in between,” he added, “is more interesting to me.”

Ouroussoff cites the Sendai Mediatheque as Ito’s breakthrough project, but for me the project that best illustrates Ito’s inventiveness and the concerns expressed in his statement, was his Tower of the Winds in Yokohama from 1986, an aluminum mesh cylinder, with a rings of light that change patterns according to exterior sounds, both natural and manmade, from crowds and car horns to the wind itself. In the context of urban Japan, so well known for its electronic signage, Ito’s explicitly noncommercial structure is a reclamation of the public realm as a field for delight.

Ouroussoff should give Ito and Times readers more than irrelevant comparisons to more famous designers and imprecise characterizations of highly original and critical works like these.