Manhattan has a new skyscraper going up and it’s a doozy.

While everybody else was busy during the past decade talking about the new World Trade Center somebody decided to build the old one’s aesthetic equivalent. 432 Park Avenue is everything people wanted in a new World Trade Center, which is really just a little bit of audacity and self-confidence.

The tower is a 1,396’ tall condominium development in midtown Manhattan and is now famous for its slender orthogonal shape and expensive gaudy apartments.

If the Twin Towers’ metaphor was of boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building came in, perhaps this one is a single column on an Excel spreadsheet dragged down, or dragged up, to infinity. In a normal building this monotony is irritating, but this is not a normal building. Instead this boxiness shows a kind of supreme self-confidence last seen in the North and South Towers.

Architecture, or at least architecture education, obsesses over designing buildings that are “interesting. The trouble is that interesting often means one-off, and one-off often means expensive. So architects on a budget who want to be taken seriously go to great lengths to ensure their buildings look more special than they actually are. They disguise conventional steel and concrete skeletons with elaborate skins, or pedestrian windows with strange louvers. The tops of skyscrapers are often festooned with silly appendages that merely grab at the sky and do nothing more. Once you notice this, many tall buildings suddenly seem a bit striving and insecure.

432 Park Avenue has none of this because it is already special. Why bother with a spire on top when the roof is already the highest in New York City? Those perfectly square windows would be boring if they measured 3 feet by 3 feet, but they are 10 feet by 10 feet. Think about that figure for a second. That’s 100 square feet per window; two-thirds the size of a typical cruise ship’s guest room is contained in every single window. It doesn’t need a silly skin or garish paint because the building is already there and it got there the honest way, through proportion.

Designing a 1400-foot tall building to fit within a 30 X 30 meter footprint must have required hard work and actual innovation in material engineering. It must have required original thought. It must make an architect who feels he just “pushed the limits” in designing his friend’s garage office feel a bit silly in comparison.

A lot of people find success in built form terribly upsetting, and articles about the structure have titles like “The House That Inequality Built.” But remember, the Twin Towers represented another kind of triumph: that of postwar American office culture. The same people who consider it obscene that 432 Park Avenue will only have 89 or so apartments would likely have been disgusted that the original towers held around 50,000 office workers on a given day.

On second thought perhaps that is a problem: that the cockiest building since the original twin towers is meant for just a handful of zillionaires. Maybe Manhattan really is becoming a fortress for the global plutocrats. Maybe Larry Silverstein should have built two 432 Park Avenues on ground zero, with the same proportions but 1,776 feet tall. Maybe he should have stuck with Daniel Libenskind’s original design for 1 WTC, which was much more adventurous. But he didn’t do any of those things. Perhaps this shows the real issue: how the increasingly nasty, political, and expensive process of completing large projects prevents normal people from enjoying interesting new buildings.