The New York Times, by Paul Goldberger

By Paul Goldberger

 It is tempting to say that there has not been a first-class public open space created in Manhattan since Central Park. It would not be true, of course - there is Paley Park, and the promenade over the East River Drive at Carl Schurz Park, and the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. But the list of decent open spaces is short - so short that it seems reasonable to wonder if we know far less than we once did about how to make civilized and comfortable outdoor places. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that most of the parks, plazas, promenades and squares that have been built in the last few years have been urbanistic catastrophes - harsh, unwelcoming spaces that seem to have been designed more with the intent of keeping people out than inviting them in.

Why this outpouring of hostility on the part of architects and landscape planners is perhaps a question better left to psychologists than to architecture critics. The builders of these odes to concrete that pass as Manhattan plazas talk constantly of security, but they never offer any evidence that there is more safety in a place that looks like a prison yard than there is in one that looks like a park. In any event, the safety they are concerned about generally turns out to be that of their plaza itself, not of the people who use it; keeping a place vandal-proof is often a higher design priority than making it pleasant to be in.

Next month, however, what may be the best public space in Manhattan in a generation - and surely the finest riverfront park in New York City since the esplanade at Brooklyn Heights was completed in 1951 - will open. It is the Battery Park City Esplanade, a linear park that runs for 1.2 miles along the outer edge of the 92-acre landfill site on the Hudson River that will contain the immense Battery Park City development.

Battery Park City is many years from completion - the major commercial component, the four office buildings that are collectively called the World Financial Center, is only now starting, and but one cluster of three residential towers, called Gateway Plaza, has so far been finished. The esplanade is not complete, either - only the section that is tucked behind Gateway Plaza is done - but that part alone is a quarter-mile long, the equivalent of five Manhattan city blocks in length.

That quarter-mile is intended to serve as a prototype for the rest of the project's open space, and to demonstrate the intention of the designers, the firm of Cooper, Eckstut Associates, to break away from the conventions that have so restricted the design of plazas and public spaces in this city in recent years. The esplanade at Battery Park City could not be more different from the norm; every inch of this quarter-mile is inviting, and bespeaks a love for parks, for rivers and, most important, for the easy, relaxed social encounters that are the ideal promise that urban life offers.

To say that the Battery Park City design breaks from conventions is a bit misleading, however, for what it really does is return to conventions, at least in another, higher sense. For the essence of this design is a wise and knowing use of the very best elements of traditional New York City park design. There are hexagonal paving stones, and granite, and three familiar kinds of benches, and old-fashioned lampposts, and there are lots of trees.

But this is no tired rerun of an old park - the designers, Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut, working with Amanda Burden of the Battery Park City Authority and landscape consultants Hanna/Olin Ltd. and Synterra Ltd., have varied shapes and proportions slightly, and have mixed and matched these familiar elements in new ways. It is the gift of these designers to have been able to use traditional elements in such a way as to make a place that seems fresher by far than almost any more self-consciously ''modern'' plaza or park.

This is perhaps the least self-conscious new public space New York City has. It looks almost as if it had been there forever - the fine granite seawalls give it an air of dignity and solidity that almost no new construction manages to have today, and there is not a single thing here that could be called shrill. This esplanade does not shout at us; it beckons warmly, quietly, gracefully. Though these designers clearly love the pure manipulation of space and the celebration of materials as much as any architect whose work is more abstract, every design decision at Battery Park seems to have been made with the ease and comfort of the esplanade's users as the paramount consideration.

A few specifics. The benches here face the river, to celebrate the view; more important, the gently curving iron rail that sits atop the granite riverfront wall is set at a height that permits bench-sitters a free and open view. The lamps are set along the river's edge, not only a good idea for reasons of security but a wonderful formal gesture, for by day the rhythms of the lampposts play off against the churning water, and by night the sparkle of the lights themselves does the same.

These benches and lampposts form a kind of outer promenade, paved in hexagonal blocks; behind it is a planter containing silver linden trees, under which are set backless benches, and behind that is an inner, asphalt walkway and another row of linden trees, and then shrubs and a pink granite wall to mark the inner border. So there are two parallel walks - an outer walk beside the water, and an inner one between a formal alley of linden trees.

If making a welcoming and pleasant public space is not easy in this day and age, making one that will work in this particular place is all the harder. For the towers of Gateway Plaza that sit beside this esplanade are institutional structures of raw concrete and brown metal panels. The buildings are the only thing ever built from an earlier master plan for Battery Park City, now wisely abandoned, and they are altogether depressing. The new esplanade not only holds its own beside them, it elevates these mediocre buildings and makes them civilized.

But the success of the Battery Park City esplanade hardly means that the tide has turned so far as public open space is concerned. If there is any doubt about that, one need only slip by the corner of 46th Street and Second Avenue, where just behind a brand-new 43-story condominium building, the Dag Hammarskjold Tower, sits as hostile a public open space as exists anywhere in the city.

The tower itself, designed by the Gruzen Partnership and Philip Birnbaum, is undistinguished and not a little institutional; it resembles certain publicly assisted housing projects from the mid-1960's. It is hard indeed to understand how such a harsh-looking building could be marketed as top-of-the-market luxury housing. But the tower is sheer poetry compared to its plaza, an awkward, ill-proportioned mess of concrete and brick, locked behind black iron gates and brick walls. Seating consists of backless benches that are no more than slabs of concrete; planting consists of a few scrawny trees and a lonely cluster of shrubs. The overriding image is of paving, of hard, bleak pavement.

Are we so desperate for open space in this city that even this kind of thing looks good? This landscape of desolation is considered a public amenity by the City of New York, which counts open plazas as bonuses for zoning purposes, permitting builders who provide them to increase the size of their buildings by as much as 20 percent. So this concrete yard is not only an eyesore in itself - it was a mechanism by which the builder of Dag Hammarskjold Tower, R.H. Sanbar Projects Inc., was allowed to make the tower even bigger than it otherwise would have been.

On a recent sunny day, by the way, the plaza was not even open to the public; it was entirely locked and gated, denying the public even the right of access to this unpleasant place that it had, by virtue of zoning bonuses, paid for. It was in protest against such similar closings that the Parks Council, a civic organization, brought legal action last year; in response the city has begun to show increased concern for the quality of public open space, and in one important case - the so-called plaza at 2 Lincoln Square that is nothing more than a dark alley - it began legal proceedings of its own against the landlord.

But legal action to bring public access to plazas that are so badly designed that no one would want to spend any time in them anyway is not the point, encouraging as it is. What is most urgent is that the standards of public space design themselves be raised. At Dag Hammarskjold Tower, we have the latest example of how not to design a public plaza; at Battery Park City we have the most encouraging example of how to do one right. The contrast could not be more striking.

By Paul Goldberger

Few things in New York last for 100 years, and fewer still mean as much at the end of a century in this city as they did at the beginning. But the Brooklyn Bridge seems only to grow in importance. It no longer seems as daring an act of engineering as it did in the 19th century, or as overwhelming a presence on the skyline, but on its 100th birthday it remains as potent, and as beloved, an icon as New York City has. It has always been something apart from other bridges. It was, of course, the first great bridge, the first roadway anywhere in the world to leap across so much water. But now that bigger suspension bridges are commonplace, the Brooklyn Bridge still holds sway over our imaginations.

It stands for so many things — for movement, for thrust, for the triumph of man over nature and, ultimately, for a city that prized these guidelines over all other things. It is important to remember that the Brooklyn Bridge was completed at the beginning of New York's great and heroic age. The 1880s were the beginning of the modern New York of skyscrapers and mass immigration, of explosive growth and intense creativity, and the bridge is the embodiment of that age’s spirit.

The bridge did not make modern New York happen, of course, but the fact that the bridge itself happened – that New York City could build a monument that was so brilliant a synthesis of art and technology – served as a convenient symbol of the city’s new power as a world capital. At the end of the 19th century, New York was a city that felt itself rapidly becoming the center of the world, and the bridge that joined it to its neighbor, Brooklyn – then a separate city – seemed to epitomize its potential.

It was not merely that the bridge crossed the East River and suddenly made ferries obsolete. A lesser structure might have done the same. The bridge was so much more than a roadway; it was, by itself, the tallest and grandest manmade thing in the city. The bridge's Gothic towers of granite were New York’s first skyscrapers, for in 1883 they stood high above everything else on the skyline; its roadway provided a spectacular panorama of the city that could be obtained nowhere else. To see the city and the river from the Brooklyn Bridge was like flying.

But the genius of John Roebling’s design goes beyond even this. The bridge is an object of startling beauty. As suspension bridges go, it was not even approached until the George Washington Bridge half a century later and the Golden Gate Bridge a few years after that. It is not quite as graceful as these newer bridges; one could not say of the Brooklyn Bridge, as Le Corbusier said of the George Washington, “Here, finally, steel architecture begins to laugh.” The Brooklyn Bridge is more somber, more blunt and hard; those towers of stone do not laugh, and neither do the steel cables in their exquisite, lyrical webbed pattern.

What makes it magic is the way the towers, the cables and the roadway all play off against one another. The towers stand like great, majestic gateways to Manhattan and Brooklyn, bringing civic grandeur as complete as anything the Beaux-Arts ever dreamed of.

The cables offer a gentle counterpoint, so delicate that they look like harp strings, and though they are, in fact, made of heavy strands of steel bound together, they make us feel that if we plucked them they would respond with beautiful music. And the roadway lifts in a gentle curve, animating the entire composition.

When the bridge was new, serious architecture critics took issue with the Gothic form of the towers. Montgomery Schuyler, the leading critic of the day, found the Gothic arches needlessly Romantic and wrote that the towers should have been in metal to reflect the modern technology of the bridge. It is easy to see how Schuyler found the stone towers retrogressive, but it is harder now to agree that this was a mistake.

For if the Romanticism of the towers is unnecessary in terms of their role as supporters of the bridge’s cables, it is perfectly suited to their function as symbolic gateways to the city.

A great bridge is, after all, a romantic object as well as a technological one; it brings a kind of ceremony to the act of crossing a river that nothing else, surely not a tunnel, can ever have.

And the stone arches remind us that the Brooklyn Bridge, for all the brilliant advances in engineering it represented, was still very much a structure of the 19th century, a structure built more by men than by machines, a structure erected piece by piece, by hand. The bridge does not seem to have whirred out of a computer, to have been made by some mysterious process that the average person can respect but not understand.

In another sense, too, the bridge is different from the great technological achievements of our own day. When the bridge was being built, it was an effort that mobilized the entire city; watching and celebrating its construction concerned all of New York, in a way that almost suggests how the making of the cathedrals preoccupied whole villages in the Middle Ages.

It is hard to imagine any effort, any kind of public work, having quite such an impact today. So the bridge also symbolizes a kind of common cause, a shared effort of a sort that we find it harder and harder to achieve.

By Paul Goldberger

It is not really true that extending the West Front of the United States Capitol would be an architectural travesty, as historic preservationists have contended in what is clearly this city's longest-running battle of esthetics. The Capitol has been pushed and pulled and altered and expanded for most of its life, and there is not necessarily any reason, given all of the changes it has been subjected to for nearly two centuries, why it should be frozen in time now.

So, in principle, there might be nothing wrong with the $70.5 million plan drawn up by George M. White, Architect of the Capitol, and supported by House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., to build out the side of the Capitol facing the mall and downtown Washington, replacing the present walls of sandstone with walls of marble and getting a few extra meeting and dining rooms in the bargain. As Mr. White is fond of pointing out, not only is the existing West Front made of delicate and crumbling sandstone - a few pieces of sandstone veneer fell off just last month - but Congress can always use a little more space. And an extension might improve the proportions of a building that some observers, Mr. White among them, have always felt needed a certain extra touch.

But if the Capitol should not be immune to change, neither is it certain that Mr. White's plan is going to make it any better than it now is, or that his judgment is superior to that of the architects who have built sections of the Capitol over the years. For 18 years Congress has been struggling over what to do about the West Front, ever since Mr. White's predecessor, George Stewart, first proposed an even grander extension for the west side. Historic preservationists were quick to point out that the West Front was the only section of the original Capitol structure that remained, and they strenuously objected to the plan, advocating a restoration of the crumbling west facade instead. Confrontation Seems Inevitable

For all the years since, forces in favor of the extension and forces supporting restoration have been locked in a standoff. Now the issue is finally coming to a climax, spurred in part by the recent falling sandstone. No one doubts that something must be done, but the two houses of Congress seem, so far, to be on opposite sides of the issue. The House opens debate Wednesday on a supplemental appropriation bill that includes the $70.5 million for extending the West Front walls. But a Senate Appropriations subcommittee has already approved $48 million to restore the existing walls, and thus a confrontation seems inevitable.

In arguing that the Capitol should remain as it is, the preservationists are claiming not only the judgment of history but also the banner of modesty in government. Nothing could be more useless than still more rooms for a Congress that seems to devour space with no ability to set its own limits, they say, and they argue that there is no real need for the extra space the extension will contain, particularly at the expense of the Capitol's historic fabric.

At Congress's request, Mr. White asked the engineering firm of Ammann & Whitney to prepare plans for restoring the facade as it now exists, a project that Mr. White's office says would cost $66 million, which he likes to point out is only a small amount less than new construction. Critics have charged that this estimate was inflated to make it appear less competitive with the cost of new construction; Mr. White denies this, but he did say in an interview that the Ammann & Whitney figure includes a 35 percent increase in costs to cover unforeseen contingencies, whereas the new construction estimate includes only a 10 percent allowance for such costs.

''If Congress votes to restore the facade as it is, all we would get is a wall,'' he said. ''But if they vote to extend it, for only a few million dollars more we can get new space, and finish the building as it was supposed to be finished.''

Whether the extension will, in fact, ''finish'' the building is, in the end, the crux of the esthetic debate, and perhaps the most important issue of all. Since the Capitol was built piecemeal, its various elements have never been as cohesive as purists might wish. The enormous cast iron dome, designed by Thomas U. Walter and erected from 1860 to 1864, was built atop a base that originally contained a smaller dome; as a result it has always seemed, visually, a bit weighed down by the huge mass atop it.

The side wings for the Senate and House of Representatives, also designed by Walter, were an attempt to correct this imbalance, and throughout the late 19th century there were numerous schemes proposed to extend the West Front. Indeed, Frederick Law Olmsted, the brilliant creator of New York's Central Park, who designed the great terraces that sprawl off the West Front, is known to have given thought to an extension, although scholars differ as to whether he truly favored one or reluctantly assumed that one would be politically necessary.

The West Front as it now stands is not, in fact, nearly as awkward a facade as the advocates of extension contend. The dome does not loom over the present West Front all that much; if the relationship of architectural elements on this side is a bit unusual, it is surely better than the one that prevailed on the East Front before Mr. Stewart managed to extend that side of the Capitol in the late 1950's. Indeed, it may just be a happy architectural accident, but the present West Front has considerable dramatic power, far more, in fact, than a more conventional classical composition might have. Pleasing Break From the Norm

With its strange arrangement of columns, the West Front is undoubtedly a rather eccentric piece of classicism, but here, too, this break from the norm is more pleasing than troubling. The west facade has an amiable quality that no other part of the Capitol possesses. It bespeaks a certain modesty that was altogether gone from Federal architecture by the middle of the 19th century, when most of the other sections of the Capitol were built, and thus it seems, today, to represent a far more benign and humane attitude than the rest of the building. It is friendly more than it is grandiose.

None of this could be said of the proposed expansion. It is proper, dull, strait-laced classicism, purged of any of the unusual touches of the original West Front. It is hard not to think that Mr. White was frightened by the eccentric and somewhat accidental mix of elements in the existing West Front, for what has been proposed is well mannered to the point of boredom.

This, in the end, is the real reason that the proposed addition is a mistake. It replaces a complex, unusual building that shows us its evolution over generations with a simplistic and flat piece of bureaucratic, by-the-book classicism. There may have been a time, a generation or two ago, when we sought this kind of purism, when we wanted to smooth over every architectural wrinkle in search of a kind of imagined perfection.

Today, however, we are much more likely to understand that buildings, like people, are complex organisms, and that a building that is the symbol of an entire country should perhaps have a bit of inconsistency to it. So the reason to preserve the West Front is not one of mere nostalgia. It is more that the original West Front is so much better than what has been proposed to replace it, and that the expanded West Front would render a complex, unusual building sadly, even tragically, conventional.

By Paul Goldberger

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company headquarters on Madison Avenue has been so widely photographed, pondered, discussed, debated and written about in the five years since its design was first made public that its actual completion threatened to be something of an anticlimax. But now that the $200 million building, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, is virtually done, the opposite seems to be true - public interest in this curious skyscraper with its ''Chippendale'' split-pediment top and Renaissance-inspired base seems only to have grown as it has moved from paper to reality.

Yesterday, officials of A.T.&T., joined by Mayor Koch, marked the unofficial opening of the building by unveiling in its new home in the main lobby the company's longtime symbol, a 24-foot-high winged statue called ''Spirit of Communication.'' Known informally as ''Golden Boy,'' the statue, by Evelyn Beatrice Longman, stood since 1916 on the roof of A.T.&T.'s former headquarters, at 195 Broadway.

The new A.T.&T. Building has been partly occupied since July, and will be fully occupied around Jan. 1, when A.T.&T.'s court-ordered divestiture of local telephone companies becomes effective. Although the public shopping arcades and covered colonnades at the building's base are not yet open, they have been visible for some weeks, and the building now appears to the passer-by essentially as it will when every detail is finished. And that appearance is a strange combination of the noble and the institutional. The A.T.&T. Building is as grandly conceived and lavishly executed a skyscraper as New York has seen since the 1930's, and the effect of some of its parts is exhilarating, even overpowering. This building has a remarkable architectural presence - it is impossible to stand in front of it and not think about the nature of space, the nature of light and the nature of stone.

Yet there are other aspects of the building that are strangely flat - not grotesque, as so many feared when its design was announced in 1978, just a bit heavy. This slab with a split pediment at its top and a series of arches and columns at its bottom was never a particularly graceful form, and now that it is done and we see all of that granite and all of that marble in place, the effect is of expanses of richness that can sometimes seem a bit overblown. Parts of this building are grand; others are merely grandiose.

The best things first. The rosy granite from Stony Creek, Conn., that the exterior is sheathed in is an exquisite material - rich, sensuous, strong, as beautiful a stone as has covered any New York building in years. And unlike the stone in so many recent skyscrapers, which has been cut into flat slabs and polished to a point that it looks like metal, this stone has been treated as stone. It has been kept to a rough finish, and it has been carved into moldings, arches and columns.

At ground level, those moldings, arches and columns create public space that is truly monumental, even uplifting. The open colonnades on the north and south ends of the building are outdoor covered rooms that are classical in spirit, yet recall no precise precedent. Their powerful space is defined not only by their 60-foot-tall granite walls and granite columns but also by immense round cutouts, like portholes, cut through the sides, the curves of which have the remarkable effect of setting the room in motion.

The portholes are cut into the stone walls at a slight angle, so that each hole is a bit wider on the inside than the outside. The effect of this is to exaggerate the sides of the portholes and make the granite walls seem even thicker than they are; it is one of the most successful details anywhere in the building, for in the best traditions of classicism it subtly manipulates our perceptions to a true architectural end.

Equally pleasing - and equally successful as an exercise in monumentality made welcoming instead of intimidating - is the long colonnade that runs behind the building from 55th to 56th Street that will eventually be lined with shops. The roof of this covered street is a quarter-cylinder of glass, and the vista looking north, by happy coincidence, is directly into the elaborate rear garden of the I.B.M. Building one block away.

The 80-foot-high arch through which the building is entered on Madison Avenue is enlivened by the vista of ''Golden Boy'' it offers to the street. And the Chippendale top, best seen from east or west of the building along 55th and 56th Streets, has turned out to be a pleasing element on the skyline - not as lyrical as it was before it was sheathed in granite, when it was a wonderful see-through steel skeleton, but a happy presence nonetheless.

The ceiling heights continue the theme of grandeur. The office ceilings are 10 feet high and those on public floors are 14 feet, meaning that the total height of this 35-story building is an unusual 648 feet.

What, then, is the problem? The most serious one is that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee's commitment to classical architecture, which seemed so daring in 1978, now seems, oddly, not to go far enough. The expanses of flat surface on this building, particularly just over the colonnades at the base, are made pleasing only by that beautiful pink granite. They would be bleak, even dull, otherwise.

There is simply not enough texture to the facade - the flat surfaces and single-pane windows mean that the building lacks the constant articulation of, say, McKim, Mead & White's Municipal Building on Chambers Street, that masterpiece of 1914 that is in many ways A.T.&T.'s most important precursor in the attempt to meld classical architecture with skyscraper design.

And though most of the building's spaces are skillfully conceived, the entry lobby is awkwardly high and narrow. ''Golden Boy'' really is best seen from the street; the experience of looking at the statue from the lobby is something like being inside a department-store window instead of being out on the sidewalk. And there are some odd choices of interior detail. Many of the public spaces inside are covered in white marble, giving them a bit of the air of a government building from the 1930's; the bronze and stainless-steel elevator doors carry a pattern of squares inside circles set inside squares that is weakly decorative beside the more ambitious architecture.

But none of this denies the building's importance to this moment in architectural history. It reminds us, more firmly than anything in New York yet has, that the stark glass and steel boxes of the International Style are something of an era already gone. For if the triumph of modern architecture was due largely to its acceptance as the American corporate style in the years after World War II, the decision by A.T.&T., the largest corporation in the world, to try something else - to create a building that would evoke something of the forms of the architecture of the past, even as it was new and technologically advanced - must rank as the beginning of the withdrawal of that acceptance.

But surely more important still is the considerable pleasure this building brings to a cityscape that has been overrun in recent years with harsh, cold, overbearing structures. In the final analysis, this is what matters; this, more than the shifting winds of architectural style, is what explains what A.T.&T. and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee were trying to achieve.

For the A.T.&T. Building as it now stands is a pleasure to walk past, to walk under, to walk through, to touch and to look at. It is unusually well made; there is craftsmanship here of a sort that is commonly thought to have died out years ago. Even where its details are awkward or its design unsure, it fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.

By Paul Goldberger

SAN FRANCISCO -- No city has seen its visual image change as dramatically in the last decade as San Francisco. If the quiet, lush districts of Pacific Heights and Russian Hill are essentially as they were, downtown has now become another city altogether, with huge, boxy skyscrapers blocking out the sun. From across San Francisco Bay the profile of San Francisco is less the gentle rhythm of hills and valleys than it is the solid mass of skyscrapers, and most of the new buildings look as if they emerged not out of San Francisco's architectural traditions but could have been built anywhere at all.

None of this is news to San Franciscans. This city has been struggling for more than a decade with the problem of guiding, if not limiting, the growth of skyscrapers. Some of its attempts have been simplistic - the proposals over the years to ban highrise construction altogether, for example, pieces of legislation that were rather desperate, if understandable, instances of overreaching that were never approved. But now San Francisco's planners have just come up with a new master plan for this city's downtown that will sharply reduce the future impact of skyscrapers, and it has implications for cities all around the country - including New York, for a portion of the new San Francisco plan resembles a proposal that is now being struggled over in New York's theater district.

The plan, which was formally presented by the San Francisco planning department to the City Planning Commission last month, strongly limits the size and location of new skyscrapers, requires the preservation of several hundred older buildings, and sets specific design guidelines to assure that new skyscrapers are slender and tapered rather than boxy in profile. If it is adopted, it would give San Francisco the most restrictive downtown zoning of any major city in the United States. It is, moreover, one of the most complete prescriptions for growth any American downtown has been given, for it specifies, block by block, what should happen in this city's now densely built-up downtown.

The plan can surely be faulted for its timing, since San Francisco's downtown has been so densely built up in the last few years that it will seem like another city altogether to those who have not seen it for a decade. But the new zoning laws it proposes are still not quite as bad as locking the barn door after the cow has gotten out. For San Francisco has not yet turned entirely into Manhattan; though its downtown has been ruthlessly treated by the forces of real estate development in the last few years, things could get a lot worse, and if this plan is adopted it will assure that common sense holds the line.

The plan is intelligent and sensitive in its sense of what makes this city special. It emerges out of an understanding that the need for continued growth must be balanced by a cautious, knowing sense of the past, and by a respect for what is small and psychologically comfortable. Moreover, the plan understands that what is needed is a mix of planning tools. There are design guidelines for individual buildings, historic preservation districts, a list of more than 200 buildings that must be preserved, and overall height limitations.

There is also a system of transferring the unused air space, or so-called development rights, from one building to another that represents an important advance. The notion is that these development rights may be transferred from the small buildings earmarked for preservation to any other site within that building's district. To put the system in simple terms, the unused air space above an older, smaller building is sold to the builders of a new building elsewhere - making that new building even bigger than it might otherwise be, but giving the landmark a financial asset. Cities all over the country, including New York, have talked about such systems for some time as a way of preserving older buildings; San Francisco is the first city to feel ready to try it on a large scale.

It is the idea of transferring development rights that is very much in the news right now in New York, where it has been informally proposed as a means of preserving older Broadway theaters. The Theater Advisory Council, a group made up of representatives of the city's theater, planning and legal communities, is expected to issue a report at the end of the year suggesting that the unused air space, or development rights, above the old theaters be available for sale to other sites around a limited part of midtown Manhattan.

The income from the sale of the air rights would serve as an impetus to encourage the theater owners to maintain the older theaters which, though they have not been officially designated landmarks, are generally considered of superior architectural quality. So far, however, New York has not worked out the details of an air rights transfer system - precisely where the air rights could be transferred, for example, and with what constraints on new development remain to be decided.

These issues have been settled in San Francisco. Should the current proposals become law, the air rights of smaller, landmark-quality buildings will be available for sale and transfer within limited downtown districts, and the parameters of new construction within these districts are defined as part of the plan (unlike in New York, where the Theater Advisory Council has just been dealing with the theaters themselves, and not with the overall issues of midtown development.)

The San Francisco plan still has hurdles to overcome. The planning commission must formally approve it, which is likely since it was the commission's own professional staff that prepared the master plan. Probable, but less certain, is the approval of the city's Board of Supervisors, necessary before the plan becomes law. But Mayor Diane Feinstein has given the plan her strong endorsement. And since San Francisco is a city in which real estate developers have never had the political power they possess in, say, New York, and since unfettered growth has never been a very popular political cause in northern California anyway, it would be a surprise if the Board of Supervisors did not approve the new restrictions (perhaps with some minor modifications) sometime next year.

The proposed San Francisco plan, along with the rezoning of midtown Manhattan which became law last year, marks an important turning point - the recognition by city planners, not to mention city governments, that bigger is not necessarily better, and that the quality of city life can sometimes be improved by opting to limit, rather than encourage, growth. While all zoning laws have placed limits of one kind of another on the freedom to build what one wants, most zoning regulations for large- scale downtowns have permitted far more growth than really makes sense.

The 1916 zoning ordinance of New York City, for example, which is the parent of all zoning legislation in the United States, places restrictions on the bulk of individual skyscrapers, but does nothing to limit the amount of growth overall. Thus, even if every landowner followed the law to the letter, theoretically every plot could be built up to its legal maximum, and the city could be a forest of skyscrapers - which in many ways is what it has become, despite the changes to the law over the years. (Indeed, some of those changes, like the special zoning districts created in New York in the 1960's and 70's to encourage such amenities as arcades, plazas and theaters, ironically resulted in larger skyscrapers, not smaller ones.)

But the new San Francisco plan makes a serious attempt to limit the total amount of growth that will come to downtown San Francisco. Not only does it limit the size of individual buildings, but it specifies, more precisely than most cities have done, where large buildings can and cannot be built. If the plan is adopted, San Francisco's downtown, so altered in the last decade, will not freeze, but it will never again change so cataclysmically. The plan allows for new construction, but it encourages the siting of new skyscrapers in the area south of Market Street, just south of the financial district's present heart. Towers may be built in the present downtown center only if they conform to stricter height limitations and do not, of course, necessitate the demolition of any of the buildings earmarked for preservation.

The San Francisco plan owes much to the pioneering work done over the last two decades in New York City - both in the sense of building on New York's zoning innovations and correcting their errors. In some ways the design guidelines San Francisco has proposed go back to the bulk requirements of New York's original zoning ordinance of 1916, in that they encourage slender towers with setbacks instead of the sleek, boxy forms encouraged by the 1961 New York City laws. San Francisco has taken a strong stance against the boxlike skyscrapers of the International Style - which is not surprising, since this school of skyscraper design has done even more damage to San Francisco's delicate skyline, surely, than it has to New York's.

The wisdom of this plan for San Francisco is almost beyond question. It is not perfect, but no plan is, and for all its specificity it does emerge out of a set of overall principles, and a coherent vision of what the city should be in 10 or 20 years. And it seems flexible enough to leave architects and real estate developers the leeway they should have; the planners have been strong in their recommendations, but not excessively narrow.

One significant difference between the new San Francisco plan and New York's new zoning laws for midtown Manhattan is the emphasis on smaller buildings in the one case, and on immediate action in the other. San Francisco's limitations are dramatic - skyscraper size will be sharply reduced, and the density of downtown blocks is to be strongly limited. On the other hand, the planners in San Francisco have not tried to force building plans that are now in the ''pipeline'' to conform to the new rules. While they have argued for a moratorium on approvals of new skyscrapers until the rules are passed, they are not asking that construction of buildings already in process of approval be held up.

In New York, by contrast, the limitations are not as strong - the reduction in density under the new rules is not as dramatic. What is dramatic in New York - and what has been the subject of a lawsuit by real estate developers - is the City Planning Commission's decision to require that all buildings, including those for which planning had already begun, conform to the new regulations. So New York's new zoning laws are more impatient, in a sense; they come out of an eagerness for immediate results. But in the long run they make a far less drastic impact on the cityscape than the rules in San Francisco.

In the end, both New York's and San Francisco's efforts are struggles to balance the public's right to a coherently planned, civilized place with the private sector's right to develop and profit from land as it sees fit. There is no formula that can quantify this balance for us, any more than there is an easy way to say just what the city should look like. No city has yet succeeded in fully achieving this complex and elusive goal - but San Francisco has just made a major step toward it, a step that puts this city, along with New York, at the forefront of American city planning and urban design efforts.

By Paul Goldberger

There are few resorts in the world like the Hamptons. Less than 100 miles from midtown Manhattan, this 50-mile stretch of villages and hamlets along Long Island's southeastern coastline contains not only wide, sweeping beaches but also miles of farmland, dense pine forests, woods of scrubby oak, meadows, dunes, marshes, ponds, bays and inlets. Not even Martha's Vineyard or the coast of Maine matches that rich array of landscapes. Though the crowds that swarm the beaches in midsummer may not see it, the Hamptons are the country as much as the seashore.

They may not remain so for much longer. Consider the following: In recent months, in East Hampton alone, plans have been filed for the town's first shopping mall, its first 7-Eleven food store and several new motels, including three on the shore of a now-unspoiled inlet, Three Mile Harbor. Moreover, the three largest tracts of undeveloped land that still remain within the town's borders have been purchased by real-estate developers, and plans have been filed to convert these expanses into tract-housing developments. Not that the South Fork - as natives like to call this spit of Long Island running from the village of Southampton to Montauk - could be called virgin territory. For years, Bridgehampton's farmland has been sliced away, piece by piece, for housing lots; condominiums have been sprouting on Southampton meadows, and weekend traffic in East Hampton has come to resemble that of midtown Manhattan on a weekday. But what is occurring now has no precedent, even in a part of the world that has seen dramatic changes in the last two decades. This year, the Town of East Hampton (a collection of communities that elsewhere would be called a township) received about 145 applications for residential subdivisions or new commercial construction between May and the middle of August - an astounding number for a place whose summer population hovers somewhere around 50,000. The pace of building proposals has been so rapid that The East Hampton Star, the local weekly, which has viewed the town's evolution with an intelligent skepticism for some years now, has not had a front page for months that did not feature a story about some new building project or zoning dispute.

Indeed, these days, as the hordes come and go every weekend, the surge of development has become the focus of an anguished battle among real- estate developers, local politicians, members of the summer community and year-long residents. It is not a simple battle between forces of change and forces of reaction, for it involves more than just building houses on the one hand and saving land on the other. Farmland is not merely on the South Fork to give a quaint rural touch. Agriculture, along with fishing, has been the anchor of the region, and turning land over to development thus changes the area's very economic base. And the rest of the open space, the woods and meadows, has more than mere esthetic value. For a region that has no public sewers and depends on underground aquifers for its water supply, extensive development has serious environmental implications.

What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that the stakes are higher now than ever. Developers know that the land is running out, and those opposed to unlimited development know that this is the South Fork's last chance to retain what rural qualities it has. Ultimately, however, it is a struggle that goes far beyond the borders of any specific piece of land, even of the South Fork itself. For what is at issue is the question of how a resort town should determine whether it wants to be large or small, busy or tranquil, open to all or the province of a few - or even whether it is possible for such a community to determine its own destiny at all.

The likelihood that the South Fork will turn into Levittown-by-the-Sea is slim. The beginnings of a reaction against the nearly uncontrolled development of recent years has set in, and it seems to be increasing. This year, Douglas Dayton, the long- time Mayor of the Village of East Hampton, which is but a portion of the Town of East Hampton, went down to defeat after negotiating to purchase a historic house on Main Street so as to provide public parking on the three acres of land surrounding the house; he was replaced by Kenneth Wessberg, a candidate opposed to the scheme.

More significantly, East Hampton's planning department recently called for the rezoning of 6,000 acres of the town's roughly 45,000 acres from minimum two-acre plots to minimum five-acre ones as a means of reducing the degree of density and slowing down development. The town was following the lead of its larger neighbor to the west, the Town of Southampton, which - having seen more rampant development than East Hampton - put five-acre zoning into effect this spring on 26,000 acres.

In Southampton, upzoning followed a long study by the town's planning consultant, David Emilita. The Town Supervisor, a Republican named Martin Lang, supported the rezoning, since he did not consider slowing down growth to be incompatible with the tenets of the Republican Party. There is already a plethora of condominium projects within the town's borders, including a unit of remarkable architectural banality, Southampton Commons, that went up two years ago just beside the Montauk Highway, the main road into town from New York. Its high visibility has made it a symbol of the growing suburbanization of all the Hamptons.

In East Hampton, local politicians until recently felt less of a sense of urgency. Indeed, two years ago, the town's planning board actually eliminated its planning department. (It was reinstated after a public outcry.) Although the Republican Town Supervisor, Ronald Greenbaum, does not believe in putting many shackles on real-estate developers, the five-acre zoning proposal was approved when it was formally submitted to the planning board about two weeks ago. (The rezoning needs to be approved by the Town Board before it becomes law.)

To a certain extent, the ongoing battle in the Hamptons over land use represents the maturing process of any resort. Whether a resort begins life as a small port, like Newport or the town of Nantucket, or as empty land, like Miami Beach or Atlantic City, or as a small rural outpost, like Carmel or Aspen, in each case it faces a similar challenge as it grows - to accommodate an increased population without destroying the qualities that attracted people to it in the first place.

Few resorts have ever done this with complete success. Aspen and Vail at the height of the ski season are as congested as small cities. Miami Beach and Atlantic City are small cities - with most of the problems of larger ones - and so heavily built up over the last 50 years that there is virtually no sense of the original landscape left. The seascape is still visible in Provincetown or Nantucket, or Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, but the crowding in these villages in midsummer is legendary, and it does much more than destroy the charm of the moment: It has the effect of eroding the basic underpinning of tranquillity that is vital to these places at any time of year.

Seldom do resort communIties start out as resorts, and the Hamptons are no exception. East Hampton and portions of Southampton look very much like New England country towns, and with good reason. They were settled by colonists from Massachusetts in the 17th century, and for most of its first century retained closer ties to New England than to New York.

The Village of East Hampton, for instance, started as a farming community. New England saltbox houses protected the farming families against the cold winters; windmills and church steeples defined the skyline. The intervening years have brought little change to the village center: It still could be New England as much as New York, though what has been preserved is the neater and more pristine New England of the late 18th and early 19th centuries rather than the messy agricultural settlement of the 17th.

East Hampton village remained a backwater until after the Civil War, not only by comparison with New York but even with Sag Harbor, seven miles up the road, which, by the early 19th century, was becoming a major whaling port and the unquestioned commercial center of the South Fork.

Things began to change by the mid-19th century. It was not easy to get to East Hampton, either from New York or New England, but the notion that sea air might contribute something to health and relaxation began to make the trip worthwhile to some pioneering New Yorkers, who rented rooms from the local townspeople. By the 1870's, their numbers had increased to the point where there were numerous boarding houses. A group of artists - including Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam and Thomas Moran - were so taken with East Hampton that they formed the village's first summer colony.

Where artists go, others follow, and soon East Hampton became a thriving summer resort. Wealthy New Yorkers began to build the sprawling, shingled houses that are now as much a part of East Hampton's architectural heritage as its New England beginnings. In 1895, the Long Island Rail Road, which had gone as far as Sag Harbor and the farming village of Bridgehampton, was extended all the way to Montauk, and East Hampton became as accessible, at least by train, as it is today.

The summer colony of East Hampton village grew slowly through the 1920's, after which its growth slowed to a trickle, and the rest of the Hamptons barely changed at all. It was not until after World War II that growth resumed, and here history repeated itself. It was artists (modernists this time) who ''discovered'' sleepy East Hampton. Robert Motherwell came in the mid-1940's, commissioning in 1946 East Hampton's first notable work of modern architecture: a glass and metal Quonset hut by the French architect Pierre Chareau. Soon, a new artists' colony - with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Saul Steinberg its most celebrated mainstays - was created.

The artists mostly settled in Springs, about five miles north of East Hampton village. They had come partly to be together, partly because land in Springs was cheap and because being in the Hamptons in the early 1950's was a way of escaping from social activity, not of landing in the middle of it. There was, in Springs in those days, not too much besides a lot of woods, a few roads, some exquisite bay front, and the remnants of an older settlement.

It took the better part of a decade, until the mid- 1960's, for the artists to attract others in large numbers: New Yorkers, Californians, jet-setting Europeans and South Americans. A symbolic beginning of the new generation of settlers is actually one of the last houses built for an arriving artist - the house and studio built in Amagansett in 1966 for the painter Robert Gwathmey. Designed by his son Charles, then a young architect, it is an essay in stark geometrics, with vertical cedar siding and a sharply slanted roof. It is a house of immense and controlled power, and it seemed to be received on the South Fork like an epiphany.

Suddenly the beach below the Gwathmey house filled up with sharp, angular modern houses, buildings jostling to be seen, although none of them had the strength and intelligence of the Gwathmey house. The popularity of the Gwathmey house as a model, albeit a misunderstood one, was a harbinger of the newest wave of settlers, the wave that is still very much in evidence.

The houses of earlier generations of summer colonists, even the grandest of the shingled cottages, were compatible not only with the traditions of the region but also with the soft and flowing ocean landscape. But the new houses increasingly filling the farmland and beach fronts were abstractions, unusual and often flamboyant shapes that had little to do with the mood of the land.

That cannot be better seen than in places like the end of Ocean Road in Bridgehampton or Daniel's Lane in Sagaponack, where some of the South Fork's most beautiful farmland has been recently built up. Houses in bizarre shapes are set chockablock against each other, and they seem to fight both the land and one another. If they speak of any values, it is of belligerence, not of community.

Some reaction has set in to the notion of the Hamptons as an architectural playground, most notably in the work of Robert A. M. Stern - who has attempted to evoke the older, shingled architecture in several new houses in East Hampton and Bridgehampton - and of Paul Segal. But, by and large, the architecture is still something of a free- for-all: East Hampton has recently seen one house that looks like an atomic reactor, while something that looks like a miniature version of the Sydney Opera House has landed on the plain in Sagaponack. It is an architecture of shrill egotism, and its arrogance says as much about its owners' esthetic tastes as about the extent of their responsibility to the land on which they have settled.

Yet, even more lasting than the architectural changes that the newest wave of settlers has brought is its ability to change the economy of the region. In earlier times, the influx of people and money into the settled old villages generally met with everyone's approval. New houses were built and new stores opened, and South Fork natives were happy to see growth, for it meant more jobs and more money. But the area's agricultural base remained basically intact.

The new wave of summer people, however, is not only far greater in terms of numbers, its styles and attitudes are very different. It isn't merely that the old shops of East Hampton - following the pattern on Manhattan's Columbus Avenue - are being squeezed out by high rents and replaced by boutiques and fancy ice-cream stores. And it isn't merely that there are more and more stores, and more and more pressure to turn more and more land into parking space. For the first time, members of the older communities of the South Fork - people whose families have in many instances worked that land for generations - are threatened in a more fundamental way.

Development pressure has grown so intense that it has become almost pointless for a South Fork farmer to go on farming. An acre of land in, say, Bridgehampton or Sagaponack, planted with potatoes, the South Fork's most famous crop, could not gross much more than $1,000 a year. But that acre - worth perhaps $7,000 to $10,000 in 1960 - could bring $40,000 as a building site by 1970, and now could probably be sold for upward of $120,000.

Housing in the developed villages is worth much more as well. It has, therefore, become increasingly difficult for the local townspeople, people whose roots in the South Fork go back hundreds of years, to go on living in their own communities. Even a modest house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in East Hampton Village can bring close to $100,000 today. Just this summer a large estate near the East Hampton village green, a house that has a view of Hook Pond but does not have that most valuable commodity of all, ocean frontage, changed hands for a reported $3.2 million.

What has happened in the South Fork over the last five years is not really any different, in fact, from what has happened in much of Manhattan. What, then, can be done? Should development be allowed to continue, on the argument that the land belongs to those who can afford it, that the best future for any community, rural or urban, is the one that occurs naturally when the free market is allowed to prevail?

Such a view smacks more than a little of Social Darwinism. It also ignores a crucial point: Even if it is right to turn the land and houses of the South Fork over to those rich enough to buy them, it is time to question just what it is that will be left to buy, as the very things that made this so attractive a landscape disappear rapidly.

On the other hand, there seem to be ethical dilemmas posed by any land-use system that interferes with the free market. If the Hamptons are becoming too expensive for their natives, many of whom at least inherited their land, they are out of reach of all but the wealthiest newcomers. And the process of ''upzoning,'' as the rezoning is generally known, will only intensify this elitist trend.

By placing a more extreme limit on the supply of land and houses, prices will go higher. So there is a seeming paradox: If the land that everyone agrees is precious is to be saved, it will become all the more the province of the rich, and less accessible to large numbers of people. But it is a paradox only if one assumes that land serves a public benefit only if it is in public hands - through public ownership or through division into parcels small enough to be within reach of people other than the affluent.

The fact of the matter is that large, undeveloped private holdings can create substantial public benefits. First, a large tract of undeveloped or lightly developed land makes minimal demands on the environment. While new construction brings greater tax revenues, it also creates greater demand for local services; and often the new revenue barely covers the cost of increased services.

Second, land that is not physically accessible to all is often visually accessible. In East Hampton Village, for example, the sweeping landscape of dune, golf course, pond and marsh that surrounds Dunemere Lane is substantially in private hands, yet it is visible to everyone, and it is one of the village's most beloved vistas. If this place were developed, more people could come to it - but nothing would be left for them to see.

These issues have come to the fore in the present disputes over development proposals for East Hampton's largest remaining pieces of open land. Perhaps the most controversial dispute involves Ben Heller, an outspoken New York art dealer who has been a part-time resident of East Hampton since the early 1950's and whose recent attempts to become a real-estate developer have put him squarely in the middle of the current struggle.

Two years ago, Mr. Heller bought a 341-acre parcel of land on a wooded peninsula called Russell's Neck that juts into Northwest Harbor, one of the most productive shellfishing areas on the East Coast. Last year, he assembled a group of investors to develop a nearby 667-acre parcel that comprises most of a huge holding called the Grace Estate. His plans were to cluster 142 housing units on Russell's Neck and 249 units on the Grace Estate, leaving a substantial portion of the land as open space.

However, in July, the two Heller sites were included in the six areas scheduled for the five-acre- minimum upzoning, a change that Mr. Heller said would reduce the number of housing units on the Russell's Neck site to 57 and on the Grace site to 110. Soon thereafter, Mr. Heller spent $4,500 to buy three and a quarter pages of The East Hampton Star to publish as a paid advertisement the entire text of a letter he sent to the chairman of the East Hampton Planning Board in which he threatened ''to sue to the fullest extent possible'' if the board adopted the proposed upzoning.

The talk of the town this summer, the advertisement was more a lecture than a letter. In it, the developer argued that the proposed new zoning was unfair since he had purchased those parcels of land on the expectation that denser development would be permitted; he was now being asked to bear the brunt of the town's new limited-growth philosophy at great financial loss. Suggesting that his plan was in the interest of the town's wish not to appear too elitist, he challenged the town to come up with the cash to purchase the land from him at what he called fair-market value, ''should its people truly and legitimately wish to preserve these properties all or in part.''

Upzoning notwithstanding, the town's comprehensive plan, adopted in 1968, suggests that, in order to maintain the area's rural quality, the town's population not exceed 63,900, which means that East Hampton is on record as believing it should get bigger. Though the town board is very much divided on the issue (and some officials, like Councilmen Tony Bullock and Randall Parsons, have been on record as favoring reduced growth), a 1976 zoning plan, which is the law of the town, suggests even more growth than the master plan. Based on the average size of household determined by the 1970 Census, it permits a ''saturation'' population of roughly 90,000, if every site is developed to the limit allowed by the zoning laws. (A recent study, based on the 1980 Census, suggests that the saturation population should be 74,000.)

If the development boom is the subject of many heated arguments in the Hamptons, the traffic problem has become an obsession with most Hamptonites. Only one main road, Route 27, connects the South Fork to the body of Long Island. Though Route 27 is four lanes wide as it passes through the beginning of the Hamptons - the communities of Westhampton Beach, Quogue and Hampton Bays - it narrows abruptly down to two lanes shortly after it crosses the Shinnecock Canal, the slice of water just west of Southampton Village that is thought of as the symbolic beginning of the South Fork. And two lanes it remains, all the way to Montauk.

A two-lane road, when it is lightly traveled, does much to enhance the rural feeling of a region. Unfortunately, the Montauk Highway may be lightly traveled on a few late nights in February, but most of the time it is a bottleneck. A few years ago, the summer traffic was bumper to bumper on the Montauk Highway every Friday going east, and every Sunday going west. Now it is frequently clogged on Saturdays and often in midweek as well.

While one group in the South Fork believes the road should be left that way (since it discourages people from driving to the Hamptons), another is supporting a new highway. Some years ago, the State Department of Transportation proposed extending the four-lane, divided Route 27 up across the fields below the moraine north of the present Montauk Highway - the extension serving as an express route to the easternmost Hamptons, while the two-lane Montauk Highway would be left to local traffic. Nothing much happened for years, until Governor Carey suggested reviving the highway plan before he left office in 1982.

The new highway is not likely to be built; Governor Cuomo does not support it. Besides, in the years since the highway was first proposed, houses have been built along its route in the northern sections of Bridgehampton, Sagaponack and the Village of East Hampton, and homeowners there have become firm opponents of the new road.

But the possibility of a new highway still entices many Hamptonites, including those who generally disapprove of development, who hope that it will ease congestion on the existing road. This is little more than wishful thinking, however, since it ignores an undeniable fact of highway construction: New highways invariably generate new traffic. In the Hamptons, new traffic would only lead to more real-estate development.

Even if one could guarantee that a new highway would ease congestion, the route set aside for it is problematic. It runs across some of the loveliest and most unspoiled land in the Hamptons - the backbone of the glacial moraine, a great ridge that rises to roughly 200 feet and runs across the east- west distance of the South Fork, dominating the landscape north of the present Montauk Highway.

The Group for the South Fork, the area's most active environmental organization, argues that a highway atop the moraine would seriously damage the area's water supply. While some studies dispute the extent of the potential water problem, no one denies that the esthetic damage of a full-size highway on this land would be considerable.

The land between the moraine and the sea, roughly two and a half miles, is a delicate landscape, ''made up of sands and gravels and silts and soils, materials easily transported, layered, rounded, smoothed, and finally flattened into a gentle contour under a domed sky at the edge of a broad gray sea,'' wrote Everett T. Rattray, the late publisher of The East Hampton Star, in 1979. This is not the sort of land that was made to be covered by an expressway.

So the best hope is that the Montauk Highway will eventually come to discourage traffic. For some, of course, there is an element of sport to it all - trying to beat the traffic jam by leaving Manhattan before the hour at which the traffic builds to a peak, trying to guess whether good weather on Sunday will mean lingering crowds at the beach and thus light traffic before dinner, heavy traffic later.

Fighting traffic on a narrow road is hardly the stuff of which relaxing country weekends are made. But not everyone on the South Fork necessarily sees relaxing country weekends as a priority. While almost everyone agrees that continued unlimited growth is not a good thing for the region, there is little consensus beyond that. Almost every faction concerned about the South Fork's future has a somewhat different interest.

Local residents, even those who are part of the growing number who question unrestrained growth, are still hesitant to curtail growth too sharply. They know that growth still brings jobs, even while they realize that it might erode the traditional agricultural base of the region. Their greatest fear, however, is the moment when they will be priced out of their own communities. Summer residents are often the most unhappy about development, but it is frequently for the most parochial of reasons, such as saving their own views. As often as not, it is the most recent arrivals who are the most vehemently opposed to anyone else coming in - who seem to want to shut the hatch and pull up the ladder.

Real-estate speculators and developers have their own financial interests at heart, and almost never see beyond the limit of their own pieces of land. Most of the area's politicians have a tendency to embrace formulas that have the look of compromise, and they desperately lack a broad vision of what the region should be.

Must the destiny of a successful resort, then, be self-destruction? It is tempting, looking at the South Fork today, to fear that it is. But there are things that can be done that neither ruin a place for everyone nor close it off to all but the rich, and some of them are possibilities for the towns of East Hampton and Southampton.

Turning the Hamptons into a National Seashore, like those on Cape Hatteras, Cape Cod and Fire Island, is neither possible nor desirable. The towns of the South Fork are big and complex communities that should not be entirely removed from private development. But there is no reason why local and county governments, perhaps in association with private philanthropies, cannot do more to remove major pieces of land from development by purchasing them. Much land is now protected by the Nature Conservancy, which has an active chapter on the South Fork, but the concentration of wealth in this area should make it possible for a far greater percentage of such privately protected land.

In the final analysis, however, it is the government's role as legislator that is the most important feature in any land-use policy. Through its powers of zoning, for example, local governments can guide and direct land development and set limits. They can also control the speed of development by limiting the number of building permits issued in any one year - a device used in some communities but never on the South Fork.

Though the government is the implicit vehicle of the public will in planning, on the South Fork there seems to be more confusion than certainty. Without a clear vision of what the region should be, there is now a desire to reap the short-term benefits of development without regard to its long-term cost.

Zoning in the Hamptons is a confused patchwork. Most decisions seem to be made ad hoc. Most disturbing of all is the sameness of the battles, the fact that the fights over each new housing development, each new shopping complex, seem so to resemble one another. And while the same arguments and the same rhetoric are repeated again and again in the hearing rooms, the sound of the bulldozers goes on.

One likes to believe that underneath all the glamour and tinsel the nature of the Hamptons remains that of rural towns - and that this, in the end, may save them. One positive sign is that the towns, again with Southampton in the lead, have begun to recognize that preserving farmland is a special problem that demands unusual solutions.

Two years ago, Southampton appropriated $6 million to acquire development rights from farmers, thus assuring that their land remains in active agricultural use. Its plan is similar to a program throughout Suffolk County, and thus far the Southampton program has saved nearly 800 acres of farmland. East Hampton has a similar, but more limited, program, but even Southampton's effort merely scratches the surface of what needs to be done.

The flashy new condominiums, ironically, have not done terribly well in either town, and this, too, in its way is encouraging. Those with the wherewithal to purchase second homes for a quarter of a million dollars still prefer to buy houses, not condominium townhouses. And despite their frenzied singles image, the Hamptons remain a family-oriented area.

What should happen now, what must happen if the South Fork is to become anything other than suburbia, is a combination of upzoning, public-land acquisition and carefully controlled redirection of commercial activity away from the overcrowded town centers. It is not going to be easy; the towns' leaders need to be willing to forgo the short-term benefits of real-estate development in exchange for the long-term future of their communities, and this takes a certain amount of political courage.

The zoning for all the towns needs to be thought through, far more totally than the current five-acre upzoning is able to do. The planner Peter Wolf - author of ''Land in America: Its Value, Use and Control'' and a resident of East Hampton - has suggested upzoning every piece of land in East Hampton by an equal percentage, and it is an intriguing thought. For example, an area in which minimum sites for houses are half an acre might then become one requiring three quarters of an acre per house, and an acre zone would become one with a one-and-a-half-acre minimum for new construction. Such a plan would treat every site equally, and it would drastically reduce the total eventual population of the town without making any landowner pay the lion's share of the burden.

Five-acre zoning, imperfect tool that it is, is crucial right now. For all the concern that it would ultimately raise land values even beyond their currently high levels, it is the only tool immediately at hand to serve an urgent social goal that unites the interests of everyone on the South Fork - the reduction of density. For developing land is not an easily reversible decision. Once land is built upon, it is gone - it is almost never brought back to its original state. The land is the true legacy of the people of the South Fork, and holding the line on the density of what goes upon it is neither capricious nor elitist. It is vital if there is to be anything left of the South Fork a generation from now.

There is, right now, on Flying Point Road - on the border between Southampton and Water Mill - an open field that seems to be on the cusp of the change from Hamptons past to Hamptons present. It is just beside the soft waters of one of the South Fork's most beautiful inlets, Mecox Bay, and the tall grasses beside the bay are outlined sharply against the deep blue sky.

The field has already been marked for subdivision, and a road has been paved, curbs and a fire hydrant have been installed, and spindly little trees have been set in a line. But nothing has been built yet. There are no houses at all, not even foundations, and the place seems to speak as much of tranquillity as of activity, as much of nature as of building. Right now, the rustle of the dune grass is the loudest sound there is. It is anybody's guess how much longer that will last.

By Paul Goldberger

Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton University is not a large building, and like much of the work of its architect, Robert Venturi of the firm of Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown, it seems at first glance not a little awkward. But its awkwardness fades into pleasure with even the slightest degree of familiarity, and as for its small size - well, let it just be said that Wu Hall is large enough to bring to Princeton, for years something of an architectural backwater, a sense of commitment to serious architectural intent that has not been seen on that campus in more than a generation.

Put simply, this is a lovely building - witty, relaxed, wise and comfortable. Within it are all sorts of lessons that are urgent today, at this moment of much rhetoric and little ideology, for it is a building whose design emerges not out of any dogma or theory but out of a brilliant compositional sense, a deep respect for architectural history and a subtle understanding of the way in which different kinds of buildings relate to each other.

In other words, no formula could have given us this building. And it does not look like buildings we are familiar with. But it is Mr. Venturi's great gift to be able to create something altogether different from what is around it and yet make his building seem fully at home. Indeed, Wu Hall even manages to confer on its undistinguished neighbors a degree of coherence and dignity that they could never possess on their own.

A word of description. Wu Hall is part of Butler College, an undergraduate living unit created some years ago out of existing dormitory buildings. It contains dining facilities, a library, lounges and administrative offices for the college, and the architect was charged with creating a building that would serve not only as a focal point for the social life of the college but would also pull together the existing buildings to hint at a quadrangle and give the entire group coherence.

The older dormitories that became Butler College are relatively recent buildings, not Princeton's proudest works by any means. The tough, self-assured Gothic style that makes up so much of the Princeton campus had withered away by the time these buildings were designed, and what followed it was neither so sure of itself nor so consistent. One of the buildings is a timid mix of Georgian and Tudor architecture designed by Aymar Embury; the other is a hard, ''brutalist'' building of the 1960's by Hugh Stubbins.

What a difficult problem it is to sneak a building tightly in between these two altogether different kinds of mediocrity and to make all three structures look as if they belonged together. There is no easy form of contextualism possible here - imitating either of the two neighboring buildings very closely would yield neither quality nor coherence. Yet, inserting a third architectural voice risks increasing the cacophony.

What Mr. Venturi has done is design a building that takes important cues from what is around it but looks like neither of the older dormitories. Wu Hall is long and low, sheathed mostly in a soft, orange brick that is similar to the brick of the Aymar Embury building, but there is limestone trim that ties it both to the Embury building and, in a loose sense, to the concrete of the Stubbins building as well.

The main facade of Wu Hall is a curious mix of the sleek and the dowdy; it is thin and taut, but it bulges and curves to suggest the expression of mass. There are horizontal strip windows set flush with the building's surface, a gesture that is sleek, but the windows are divided into smaller panes, which makes them seem more old-fashioned. There are old-fashioned wooden schoolhouse doors, but projecting out over them is set a multi-story panel of white marble and black granite that make up a pattern of circles and arches and triangles - a kind of huge, overscaled ornament.

There are vague allusions to Elizabethan manor houses here, but at bottom, this building, like all of Mr. Venturi's works, is modern. Though he is often tagged with the label of postmodernist - indeed, he is nothing if not the philosophical father of this movement - his interest is not in reproducing historical form but in creating what might be called abstract representations of it, and these are very different things. Mr. Venturi may break from orthodox modernism by seeking to re-establish the importance of ornament and historical style, but he does so by abstracting these elements, not by reproducing them literally, and this act of abstraction is itself a kind of modernist statement.

This building is an act of compositionalism - the assemblage of elements for a picturesque and visually pleasing effect. In his interest in the picturesque, Mr. Venturi joins himself to the eclectic architects of the early decades of this century, who are in many ways his greatest inspiration. To do this with elements that are also in part modernist ones - in other words, to be picturesque with elements that are not literally historical - is genuine proof of design talent.

Moreover, it bespeaks a considerable self-confidence, a sense of assurance that has not been seen on the Princeton campus since the Gothic buildings of more than half a century ago. While Wu Hall is admittedly self-conscious, it does not wear its eccentricity so heavily as one might think - if this facade is a trifle odd at first glance, after a few moments it comes to feel right. Mr. Venturi is able to render unusual forms normal, to make them feel far more comfortable than they might, in other hands, be.

The interiors are both handsome and sensitive to the needs of undergraduates. There is a large entry vestibule leading into the dining hall, which is lined with the kind of tongue-in-groove oak paneling that calls to mind old-time schoolhouses, but here turned into something exuberant and friendly. There is a welcome mix of banquettes, long tables and small tables, also in oak, and inviting, solid, old-fashioned oak chairs. The room is light and airy, and a high, multi-story bay window at one end brings a hint of monumentality; the space comes off as a pleasing cross between a cafe and a grand dining commons.

The allusions to monumentality continue elsewhere. On the other side of the vestibule is a stairway that mounts toward another rounded bay window; beside the regular stairs are larger, higher steps suitable for informal sitting so that the stairwell can function as a spontaneous gathering place. A comfortable lounge and library are on the upper level.

Outside, Mr. Venturi has re-organized the open space between Wu Hall and the Stubbins dormitory to give it some sense of focus; it is an effort that climaxes in a mock-classical column that sits in the center of the space, intended as both sign and symbol for Butler College. As with the details of the building itself, classicism is here abstracted - the column is not a real three-dimensional one, but a kind of two-dimensional billboard of a column fastened onto a concrete backing. But it is far from casual - it is elegantly crafted, and culminates in an extraordinary white marble ''capital'' that is itself topped by a Princeton tiger, the form of which gracefully and subtly becomes a kind of classical molding. It is a most delightful whimsy, like all of Mr. Venturi's architectural witticisms, not excessive or hard to take on repeated viewings.

Indeed, the architectural gestures here, the allusions to other kinds of architecture, the ornament, the abstracted and overscaled details, are never permitted to get in the way of the architectural sense of the building. The gestures may be large and daring, but the program, the sense of purpose for which the building was created, still reigns supreme.

By Paul Goldberger

RYE BROOK, N.Y. -- If Palladio had designed a spaceship, it might have looked something like the new headquarters of General Foods Corporation, which opened last week in this small village in the center of Westchester County. The building is perhaps the most curious mix of classicism and futurism ever produced; it is as sleek as any corporate headquarters anywhere, yet it seems, at the same time, to want to make us think of great country villas.

The architect was Kevin Roche of the firm of Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates, an architect whose work, even where it disappoints, has never lacked for inventiveness, even daring. Mr. Roche, who is also the architect of the United Nations Plaza Hotel and the Metropolitan Museum additions in New York, is particularly noted for his work with glass and metal, and it is generally along the lines of what has come to be known as Late Modernism - an architecture that uses the sleek, smooth surfaces of Modernism to produce forms that are less purely rational and more picturesque than the cool, austere boxes that are the most common legacy of modern architecture.

That is surely what Mr. Roche has done here, but in a way that is new, even for his work. The General Foods building is an immense, sprawling seven-story structure of white aluminum siding - essentially the same siding one might find on a little suburban cottage, but here applied to a building that is frankly, openly monumental. The building is rigidly symmetrical, with a long central portion, two projecting side wings and a huge semicircular portico in the middle topped by a domed skylight.

It is the dome and portico that are the truly startling things here, for it is they that render this building a classical villa. From the Cross-Westchester Expressway, which passes close to the site, the glistening white top might look like a flying saucer; from close up, however, there can be no mistaking the fact that this is a classical portico, rendered in slick, modern materials.

Now, suburban corporate headquarters for some time have been the closest equivalent our age can come to the great country villas of the past. Far more than any residence we build today, a corporate headquarters symbolizes both the financial power and the control over land that huge country estates once possessed. This symbolism has rarely, if ever, been given literal expression architecturally; most suburban corporate headquarters, even the best of them, have tended to be modern buildings extended horizontally, skyscrapers permitted to sprawl across the landscape.

Kevin Roche by now must be considered the preeminent architect of suburban headquarters buildings - his additions to Deere & Co. in Moline, Ill., his new Union Carbide building in Danbury, Conn., and his building for Richardson-Merrell Corporation in Wilton, Conn., are among the most talked-about such structures in the nation. In each instance the architect has made some sort of attempt to create a building that responds to the particular nature of a suburban office building, whether by relating the building closely to its natural landscape, as at Deere, or hiding parking within its base, as at Richardson-Merrell. In no case has Mr. Roche simply turned a skyscraper on its side.

But General Foods represents a departure even for Mr. Roche, in that here, for the first time, he has allowed the latent villa-like tendencies of the corporate headquarters to come to the surface. General Foods may on one level be the sleekest building in Westchester County, but on another level it is the clearest, most direct attempt to create a contemporary equivalent to the classical villa that any corporate architect has created. It is not for nothing, therefore, that the Museum of Modern Art included an early study for this building in its Beaux-Arts architecture exhibition of 1975, and though the building that was actually erected is somewhat more modest than the one shown back then, the sense of Beaux-Arts principles being merged with modern, almost futuristic imagery still remains the thing here.

If this is a classical villa created for the modern corporation, it is also a classical villa created for the automobile. It is designed to be approached and entered by car, not by foot - both employees' and visitors' cars are parked within the base of the building, and the only way to have any contact with the handsomely landscaped surroundings is to go back out from the building on a grand staircase that bridges over the automobile entry drive.

In what may be a more literal recollection of the social order of country estates than either the architect or the client intended, visitors' automobiles enter in the front, by plunging into the base of the building under the portico, while all of the employees enter via a separate drive that goes around to the back. It is only visitors who get the proper, classicizing approach to the building, then - their driveway comes off Westchester Avenue and curves slightly, then heads right on axis toward the semicircular portico.

From this direction, the building is a stunning and powerful presence; the portico with its glass dome anchors the view, and the side wings reach out in a symmetrical embrace. The landscaping is fairly naturalistic, with a meandering lake, trees and some uneven open plots of grass, and if it is not quite Blenheim Palace here, it is clear that there were at least vague thoughts of Capability Brown.

The biggest problem with the entry approach is that the road is much too short - this is a building that really must be approached gradually, growing slowly larger as we see it on a slow, half-mile drive. But the entry road as it now is thrusts us much too quickly toward, and then into, the building. This is a function not of poor planning but of the size of the site, which is 54 acres in size, certainly large enough to contain the building but not anywhere nearly big enough to give the structure the vast expanse of land it should have around it.

The employees' entrance lacks even the reduced drama of the too-short visitors' drive; it comes off the main road at another point altogether, and offers only a view of the back of the building - a side that is very much a back, for it is flat, only moderately landscaped, and tucked close up to an older building on the site that General Foods uses as its International Division headquarters. But if employees enter in a manner that calls to mind the doorways of servants, they are treated altogether differently once inside. The interiors are generously, in some cases even lavishly, appointed, and they have been designed with considerable care both for employee comfort and efficiency.

The interior spaces are arranged around a 95-foot-high atrium which contains a cafeteria at its base and culminates in the glass dome. If the country house analogy is not too strained, it might be thought of as the great hall, and indeed it is, for it functions not only as an eating facility but also as a general communal space, creating a visual and symbolic focus for the disparate wings of the building. It is from here that the grand staircase spills out to the grounds, giving employees access to the landscape in front of the building.

The offices are calm and ordered, with the important detail of clerestories to bring natural light from outer offices into inner ones. Most of the partitions are covered in a soft rose-colored fabric, and files and furniture is dark mahogany; together these materials create an elegant and rich counterpoint to the white crispness of the exterior. The enormous size of the building means that certain departments are set at considerable distance from others, but within each department the layouts are flexible and efficient, and the offices warm and welcoming.

The executive offices are on the top floor, set in a semicircle that goes around the top of the dome. It is difficult not to think of the Sun King with his axial bedroom at Versailles when one observes that the chairman of the board and the president are both on the central axis of this building, too - atop the portico and right on line with the entry drive. This semicircle of offices sits like a crown atop the building; it does not exactly symbolize the closeness of the executives of General Foods to their troops, but it is presumably what the company wished, and it has been executed with considerable finesse. This floor could not be farther from the anonymity that has characterized so much corporate design - indeed, like every aspect of this impressive building, it bespeaks a powerful presence.