I’ve had mixed feelings about Frank Gehry’s IAC Building on Ninth Avenue, his first in the city, since it was completed in 2007.  It’s shape, meant to evoke sails, seemed strangely rigid, and its patterned white glass panels seemed ugly.  During the day it felt willfully eccentric and at night it felt massive and misplaced, like a bright white spaceship.

Then this weekend I passed it and, when viewed against the gray winter sky and clumps of snow, it seemed entirely natural and perfectly placed, like an urban mountain.  Maybe it was the bone-chilling temperature that rattled my point of view.  Or maybe it just took the building a few years to settle in and reveal how it fits into the city.