This is actually very similar to F Scott Fitzgerald's criticism of Summit Avenue back when it was newly built. I think stuff that is gimmicky and overdone tends to age well. Each era has its' own iteration of that. Once a building is no longer new I think it is the excessive gaudy stuff that becomes the marker of its' era and is most beloved. Simple boxes are simple boxes in every era.i find this project a little gimmicky and overdone, trying too hard. but this is uptown and perhaps a little of this is fine.
When my parents were younger they were friends with the son of Louis Skidmore of SOM. My dad once asked Louis Skidmore why everybody was tearing down beautiful old Victorian buildings and replacing them with modernist boxes. Skidmore's answer was that Victorian architecture was gaudy and kitsch and that nobody with good taste liked it anymore. The ornamentation was excessive, the clean, sleek lines of Modernism were far superior. I have always remembered this vignette as an example of how people of one era might judge architecture in completely different terms than the next.
I suspect that a lot of the residential architecture being built today will be loved a century from now. Even stuff that we criticize now like Murals or 222 Hennepin. The quality of architecture of smaller buildings has been on a serious upswing over the last decade but we are generally unable to recognize it because this city is full of obsessive perfectionists.
