What kind of year has it been for architecture in New York? Certainly, 2004 lacked the drama of 2003, when there seemed to be a news conference a week to declare some major development in the evolution of Ground Zero. If last year belonged, or seemed to belong, to the visionaries, this year the incandescence of controversy simmered and hardened, as was bound to happen, into a series of bureaucratic squabbles.

At the same time, however, more than one architect has told me that he cannot recall a period when so much construction was going on in Manhattan. The city seems positively to percolate with new construction. We have seen the rise of the Hotel Gansevoort, the near completion of the Bloomberg Tower, and Alvin Ailey’s new Joan Weill Center for Dance on West 55th Street. Yet few other buildings completed this year are conspicuous for their architectural excellence.

Now it is in the nature of architecture, unlike movies and CDs, that it arrives in slow motion. Even if buildings often open officially on a given date, in fact, they materialize slowly, but in plain sight, over a period of years.

Among the multi-year projects that were completed in the past 12 months, the most important, surely, was Time Warner Center, which opened the doors of its shopping center in February. By October, the first sinuous dissonances were braying in Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Architecturally, the Center, designed by David Childs and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is more than the sum of its parts, and its urbanistic success is far more spectacular than its architecture.

Another important development at Lincoln Center was the announced intention to transformed West 65th Street from a darkened and submerged automobile route into one of the city’s great cultural thoroughfares, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. But a lot can happen – or, more precisely, not happen – in New York City development, and we have yet to see whether any of their fine notions will come to pass.

Surely the single greatest cultural event in the city’s architecture this past year has been the reopening of the greatly expanded Museum of Modern Art. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, its parts, for once, are more than their sum. This Japanese aesthete was the victim of the urban circumstances he inherited, and he managed the many parts of the new structure without, however, creating a coherent or compelling whole.

Down at Ground Zero, the provisional transit hub, designed by the great Santiago Calatrava, was impressive in itself and highly promising of things to come. At the same time, the shimmering curtain wall of 7 World Trade Center, designed by David Childs once again, is looking a little better than I had initially imagined. We will have to wait a bit longer, though, before coming to a decisive conclusion.

In any case, much of the debate that centered around Ground Zero one year ago has now shifted to the development of the Far West Side, where the great question is whether a new Jets Stadium will or will not be built. This is a different kind of debate, however, from the one that engaged the world’s attention in Lower Manhattan.

There, in the face of incalculable historical events, each side of the argument sought to present itself in a visionary light on the world stage. The development of the Far West Side, by contrast, is purely local, and represents the hardball of certain local interests competing for the sympathies of a public that really couldn’t care less.

The great story last year was that, due to the debate over Ground Zero, the public was more interested in architecture than ever before. Well, that was true only in the sense that it could hardly have been less interested. This year, even if New Yorkers’ interest in architecture remains stronger than it was a decade ago, it has largely receded from the levels we saw last year.