Timothy, I’m familiar—like the deconstructivist-ish abode that is obligingly falling apart, the Woodside town house, is missing from Herrin-Ferri’s handbook. As you’ll know, the residential stylings of northwestern Queens command attention by inadvertently raising the slipshod to the level of slapstick, daring the passing pedestrian to temporarily abandon the dispositional indifference that is the rightful inheritance of all New Yorkers (i.e., the shoulder shrug). The primary strategies of layering and accretion accord with the behavioral maximalism of homeownership here in the land of “more is more”; but in New York, the remodeler is compelled to assimilate a local context—the psycho-material substrate of the city. The bearing of your “faux Gehry” betrays the former but not the latter condition, evoking the arid placelessness of a Dwell magazine spread. The squat multifamily walk-up is one of three built in 2007 (just on the cusp of the shelter mag’s great decline) along a parched stretch of Thirty-Second Avenue between Fifty-Eighth and Sixtieth Streets (gaps in the street numbers and duplicates, even triplicates, being common for the area—not that you need reminding). The trio are set back from the sidewalk, and in the space between, a schematic paving pattern aims, without much success, to delineate front yard from driveway. Each houselet has its own identity, reinforced by the exposed ends of party walls. The left and middle units appear to have been treated as a set that admits variations in the cheap-looking brick, which spans the base of both residences, and the vinyl cladding, which comes in two color treatments: bluish-gray and faded orange. Small awning windows and large projecting box windows hang in a loose arrangement. The right house incorporates only the latter in its bid to stand out from its neighbors; the Gehry influence is evident not only in the cavalier handling of the sheet metal façade but also in the way those pop-eyes, well, pop through the recessed dermis. The architect seems to have had a passing knowledge of the Stata Center in Cambridge, which opened in 2004. That project’s leaking and mold problems—allegedly caused by faulty façade assemblages—led MIT to pursue litigation against Gehry three years later. But even Frank, who vigorously defended his work, characterizing its functional deficits as “minor,” would have second-guessed the cladding tolerances evidently found permissible in Woodside.