Building directly opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's famed Glasgow School of Art, as Steven Holl has done, is simultaneously a plum job and the commission from hell.

There are few American campuses more urban than Columbia University's; even its athletic fields are in Manhattan, grouped together in the cramped Baker Athletics Complex at the island's northern tip.

It's not exactly a house, nor entirely a gallery, but it does have a wine bar'and might best be described as 'semi-public.

In museum circles, curators and artists are well known for kvetching about architects who compete with the art on view by foisting major design statements onto willing clients.