David Galbraith, looking at a floor of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein on the market for €1,080,000, concludes that either “architecture is vastly under valued or painting prices are almost entirely irrational”.

I hope he’s right: architecturally-important residences should sell at a premium. It’s by far the best way to prevent them from being demolished. But it’s hardly irrational that they don’t.

The apartment in the Villa Stein, for instance, is in Garches, an undistinguished western suburb of Paris which, in the words of one website, is “mostly known for the Raymond Poincaré Hospital, which is specialized in medical treatment of road accident victims”. Not the kind of place that a rich art lover would really want to live. What’s more, it’s only 105 square meters, or 1,130 square feet: decidedly cramped if you’re the kind of person who is likely to drop millions of dollars on an artwork.

A great piece of architecture in a desirable location can sell at a premium, and a great piece of architecture which can be packed up into six containers and reconstructed anywhere in the world will sell for even more. But in general people looking to buy important architecture only want to do so if there’s a reasonable chance of them actually living in the house in question — at least for some of the year. If such people don’t want to live in Garches, then the seller of the Villa Stein flat is out of luck.

I am ultimately bearish about the prospects for collectible architecture — while it’s possible to imagine a world where it exists, it seems impossible to get there from here. But that doesn’t mean that the entire art market — a market where people get to buy unique and portable objects to savor and enjoy at their leisure — is irrational. It just means that architecture doesn’t behave in the same manner.

A few weeks ago I noticed an armed private security guard outside the new Bank of America tower on 42nd Street; today there were two, both sporting Wackenhut logos on their shoulders. These aren’t some paramilitary Hercules team sporting machine guns, they’re just guys with sidearms patrolling the sidewalk in front of a bank. Which might be normal in Charlotte, I don’t know, but is certainly not something I ever remember seeing in NYC. Any idea what purpose these guys are meant to be serving? And are they going to be there permanently?

Depressing news from Christina Lewis today: we’re entering yet another round of unhelpful bickering between the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein over the future of the World Trade Center site. What we desperately need is a strong New York governor willing to knock heads together — but we didn’t have that in George Pataki, and we certainly don’t have it in David Paterson.

Silverstein seems to think that the Port Authority should provide financing for him to build millions of square feet of empty office space at the site, even after it took responsibility for financing the Freedom Tower (now called 1 World Trade Center) off his hands. The Port Authority’s response is spot-on:

Officials note the agency finances major infrastructure projects throughout the region. They say backing Mr. Silverstein’s projects would prevent the agency from fulfilling its core mission.

“It’s not for the public sector to be financing speculative buildings,” said Christopher Ward, the agency’s executive director.

I hope that the Port Authority does manage to force Silverstein to scale back his ambitions: as a New York taxpayer, I have no particular interest in providing this particular property speculator with low-cost funding which gives him all the upside and leaves me with most of the downside.

On the other hand, we do seem to be moving to a world where the only two towers to be built on the site for the foreseeable future will be the boringly gigantic Freedom Tower by David Childs, and the dully minimalist 4 World Trade Center by Fumihiko Maki. The two interesting buildings, from an architectural standpoint — the Norman Foster and Richard Rogers towers — look set to exist on paper only.

Also, two questions for the WSJ. First, where did they get the idea that Ground Zero is “the most popular tourist attraction in Manhattan”? And second, why does the sidebar open up in PDF format? Most peculiar.