This reminds me of that conversation you can get into with opera fans about age 30. They are musical as much as or more than I was at their age, and they’ll spend their money on opera tickets that cost a multiple of the amount I used to part with. They’re deep into Deborah Voigt, Renee Fleming & Co. But I’m sad for them because they missed Nilsson, Norman, Te Kanawa, Caballe, Horne. People even ten year older than I am tell me it’s inexpressibly sad that I could never know Flagstad, Schwarzkopf and Callas except as recording artists. My point is not that things are getting worse while staying pretty damn good — and they may be, but that’s a separate issue — but that some peerless experiences are all tied up with our unique and irreplaceable youth; to be undone, at that age, by the best of what is happening is indeed a lasting joy to be jealously guarded. “Very heaven,” as Wordsworth said.

Is architecture like this? Or, more correctly, is “place” like this? Oh, yeah — you can’t go home again. My gattinara is better than your phallocrat any day of the week, provided I knew her on her turf way back when. And I don’t like it when the architecture of the botched bris rises only to smash down the genius loci. This is not about preferring the Ara Pacis the way it was when I was 25, or even about thinking the new museum is a bad building — which I might or might not think. While recognizing Meier’s gifts, and being fully able to see good things in his projects, I tend away from him, because — to me — he exemplifies toxic 70’s head space, and I admire progressivism in architectural thinking and design, along with the much lighter hand it mandates. Get me Renzo Piano — because, hey: things must change — and I’ll deal very well with cat loss, even with the scattering of the gattinare, the last real acolytes the Ara Pacis is ever likely to have, the final heiresses of Empire, and a ravishing iteration of an impulse going back to Imperial times.

People do have to like what’s happening in their time if they find it good — every place in Rome was once sacred to someone or something that got brushed aside for the new thing to happen. For Raphael to paint the Stanze Raffaelo in the Vatican, frescoes by Piero had first to be destroyed. I do wish someone then had bothered to think whether there was a better way, but it wasn’t the spirit of the age to conserve the infinitely precious provided it looked old-fashioned enough. So things had to be adjusted in favor of the more powerful genius, didn’t they? And 500 years later almost to the year, there are many people to ask: um, which of the two painters was that? Progress can be both brilliant and wrong, but loss is irretrievable.

Often in that time I would walk to the Ara Pacis last thing at night. It was housed in a humble structure that no genius could have imagined, lit well enough, and there were cats — the feral cats of Rome that descended from Egyptian temple cats, cats that crazy ladies kept alive with tinned salmon, and brought blankets to at night, lining crates, stacking these crates into cat hotels for the bitter winter dark, returning before dawn to break it all up. Too much happens in a day in Rome, so that whatever you are doing the present moment tends to be pressed down and crowded out. It’s very good at the end of the day just to go to where you can think of empire and cats. Richard Meier has nothing — and I mean nothing — to offer such a place, and I am heartily sorry he was ever asked to set foot in it.

That said, it’s unnecessary to criticize his building, but I will anyway. The Ara Pacis is — very sadly — cheek by jowl to the massively fascistic Piazza Augustea. No accident, as the writers above have remarked — Mussolini was tremendously identified in his own mind with Imperial Rome. The scale he preferred said as much — just that little bit outsize so that it made a bad fit with everything around it, a McMansion in a neighborhood of Cape Cods. For many years — as a helpless connoisseur of fascisti architecture, having seen literally all of it — I have suspected that Richard Meier took major cues from Mussolini’s sense of design. This was confirmed by a trip to the then-brand new Getty Museum in 1997. Oh, it’s just a feeling. It doesn’t mean I think he’s a bad architect, it just means I recognize in him a sensibility I don’t like. Sure, it could be me — but I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

So, truly, for Meier to have designed a museum to house the Ara Pacis — well, it’s like hearing that a pair of socks that got separated in the 1940’s has been matched back up and rolled into a drawer. A kind of order has been created — the kind that happens when two people you just hate up and marry one another. No matter how bad it is, it’s really right for aesthetic reasons.

As I said, I don’t like to be disagreeable. But between a Richard Meier box and a cat hotel under the moon, lovingly maintained by the gattinara population, there’s really nothing to choose.