In 1929 this Daily News Building was a blast from the future, standing by itself on 42nd Street, way out east beyond 3rd Avenue where skyscrapers had not yet dared to scrape, looking amazingly stripped-down, a new shape and a new assertion of what buildings were supposed to look like.

It doesn't have a top. That was the radical thing. Its shapes emphasize its verticality ("it looks way tall") and the architect did away with the whole notion of a pediment, and more than that, not much difference between base and shaft. The vertical piers just halt in mid-flight as if they'd been cut straight across with a putty knife, a new approach, a new visual relationship to the sky that must have messed with people's perceptions of height and scale and distance ("made them happily dizzy").

Big news.

That's all great for historical reasons but I want to point out something strange and useful about the Daily News Building. It's a clean-lined modernist landmark. AND it's user-oriented, friendly, ornamented, and so talkative it verges on flattery. If you've always come along thinking, like me, that all modernist buildings are self-involved bastards, here's a good argument to the contrary.

"Officially" the first American skyscraper based on German modernism was the gorgeous 1929-1932 PSFS Tower in Philadelphia, but it was the Daily News Building that made the public happily dizzy. As the home of the largest-circulation newspaper in the country and with an irresistible giant revolving blue globe in the lobby, an attractive nuisance if ever there was one, this building became a huge tourist attraction and crowds swarmed around the globe in the lobby. (In the 1930s, not now.) The writers of Superman comics adopted the Daily News Building as their superhuman's workplace with two minor changes. They took the globe out of the lobby and put it on the roof, and they changed the name to the Daily Planet.

(So if being a pop-culture trivia answer makes a building significant in a postmodern self-referential diversionist upside-down Bizarro world where the workplaces of our superheroes are mapped and analyzed and fully documented and understood a/o/t the neglect and ignorance we lavish on our actual physical surroundings, then yeah, the Daily News Building is significant.)

At this point in late 2006 the novelty has completely faded. No more crowds around the globe in the lobby. Once daring and cutting-edge, it's only ordinary. It's not the only skyscraper in the neighborhood anymore, it's one of a great stylish Turtle Bay collection nearby, including the Chanin Building and the Chrysler Building. The newspaper moved its withering business model out in 1995.

The architect was Raymond Hood. This whole 37-story tower thing was his idea.

"Having told Hood he wanted a printing plant and some simple offices, (Daily News publisher Joseph) Patterson was stunned when Hood presented him ten weeks later with plans for a thirty-six-story office tower and an adjoining nine-story printing plant hunkering inconspicuously behind it on 42nd Street. Hood abjured an aesthetic justification - he never rooted his arguments in theory or what he later called 'beauty stuff' - and instead told Patterson how rent collected from office tenants would boost the paper's profits. Unconvinced, Patterson resisted - until he saw a devastated Hood sag like a punctured tire. According to an eyewitness, 'After waiting till the effect of his blow was complete, [Patterson] put his arm around Mr. Hood and said, "Listen, Ray, if you want to build your god damn tower, go ahead and do it."'"

This is according to Daniel Okrent's Great Fortune, page 122. The eyewitness to Patterson's "god damn tower" remark was a guy named Walter Kilham. Kilham was Hood's chief draftsman who worked on this Daily News Building, and later a chief proponent of Hood's legacy.

(And if a relationship to Frank Lloyd Wright is the only thing that makes a building significant in an atmosphere still dominated by Wright's relentless and tiresome and fraudulent self-promotion as the Source and Center of All Good Things, you should look into the early pages of Many Masks, where Wright tries to take credit for the top of the Daily News building, claiming to have drawn the tip of his cane across the elevation in Raymond Hood's office, "Ray, you just stop the whole thing right here," whereupon Kilham jumps to his feet and identifies himself and stops Wright's lie in its tracks. It's one thing to steal a dead man's glory (Hood died young) but it's another to steal it with the tip of your cane.)

And Hitchcock's point was that these four buildings represented an inevitable, irresistible evolution over ten years' time from ridiculous and untidy ornament to strong, honest modernism without ornament. As if this represented progress. He says the two first buildings are "luxuriantly wigged and bearded with applied Gothic."

Not that pointing out Hitchcock's errors is unusual or any fun anymore, but his butt-headed analysis ignores the fact that 1 and 2 are chronologically backwards, that between 2 and 3 Hood did a wigged-and-bearded church in Scranton, and the News Building and the McGraw Hill Building are as identified by their ornament as they are by their heights and shapes. These architects, they all like to pretend they're looking down like God. They like to look at the total shape from way far away. That's not how users experience the building.

The way users experience this building is underneath an amazing incised-granite panel, and inside a welcoming lobby with a giant globe. That globe pulls you in from the sidewalk like gravity. The globe and the weather dials have a wonderful Hoch Science look and feel, very similar to the stodgy and authoritative exhibits at the old Chicago Historical Society, right down to the 1930s-vintage typography. (That wonderful old place in Chicago has been wiped clean by the way, although I think they've kept the dioramas.)

The educational value of all this was as dubious then as it is now. Kilham writes, "At first Capt. Patterson hooted at the idea. 'Weather charts!' he snorted. 'What the people want are "murder charts": some kind of map of the metropolitan area where the latest crimes could be chalked up.'"

Not a bad idea. I'm beginning to like Captain Patterson.

The globe was engineered by Peter Clark Inc. to revolve on its polar axis; Dr. James Henry Scarr of the New York Weather Bureau was put in charge of dreaming up and putting educational weather stuff into the brass cases, and the globe was painted by D. Putnam Brinley. Hood and his team put all this lobby presentation together and excitedly invited the client down for a first look. On his first look at this giant blue globe, Patterson said, "It's 'pretty swell' all right, as you say, but it's turning the wrong way." So much for Hoch Science.

Take a look at that stone screen. There's a lot of information there, and some strange things going on, like the horse-and-rider and mother-and-child appearing from nowhere in the clouds. There are flappers. Evidently there was regular transatlantic Zeppelin service from about 1931 through 1937, did you know that? So the Zeppelin nosing in from stage right isn't just a gag.

We discovered recently, doing research for our architectural sculpture book, that the sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan is responsible for this carving. Not Chester Gould.

Despite his name Chambellan was born in New Jersey and ranks as one of the top ten American architectural sculptors. . He worked with Hood consistently from the Tribune Tower and has work represented at Rockefeller Center, and Kilham even has him tinkering with the massing of the building. "Mr. Hood enjoyed having him come up to the office with his modeling tools to work on the plasticine block-model of the building. Under his direction, Chambellan would cut off a little here, add a little there, until it seemed to have the right effect - all in coordination with the plans, of course."

"They Made So Many of Them" -- that's from a quote attributed to Lincoln. "God must have loved the common people; he made so many of them." Actually that's a misquote two different ways. Lincoln is supposed to have said, "God must have loved common-looking people; he made so many of them," referring to himself. But he didn't really say that either. So it's the perfect touch of phony populism for a big-city newspaper and its diverse, messy readership carrying movie cameras and training dogs.

The real sophistication here is in its mediation of the height of the cloud-obscured tower (c'mon, it's not THAT tall) with the sidewalk. It has to force in two scales to do it, but it works visually. The visual style here, the line, seems way more fluid and sophisticated than anything at Rockefeller Center. Unlike the public art at Rockefeller Center, it's not about news, or News, or the heroic collection of News, or the Cosmic Importance of News, or a brawny half-naked pressman tossing a gigantic roll of newsprint from a locomotive at another musclebound half-naked pressman, or anything like that.

This panel tells you how to appreciate the building. It's about the relationship of the building to the street, and it's about the people on the street, and since you're standing right there on the street looking at it, it's about you.