In fact it’s a kind of designer’s paradise, especially for graphic designers. With a low cost but high standard of living, you can afford to have a freelance career if you can afford to buy  a computer–just look at self-made Kiwi internet and branding design gurus like Nick Fracture, Cleve Cameron and Jack Yan.

Cameron spoke at this years Semi-Permanent festival, New Zealand’s answer to New York’s ICFF. It’s hard to explain just what he does–except perhaps to call it avant advertising, a kind of public relations practice that combines a keen visual sense with conceptual flair with a little bit of Dada. The same could be said of Jack Yan: neither conventional advertising consultant nor graphic artist, Yan was described to me by the editor of one Auckland design magazine as “everywhere at once”, skipping from branding conferences to design fairs to product launches. And then there’s the protean Fracture, who won Best Interactive Design at last year’s SXSW festival, and richly deserved to: just look at the website linked to his name above.

These exotic, hybrid creatures thrive in the rarefied climate of New Zealand, along with designers of all kinds, especially young ones–it’s startling the number of people under the age of 35 who are engaged in the field. But why?

One design-savvy Aucklander who declined to be named told me, “There’s really not a whole lot else to do.” It’s true. With only 4m people, the country fits less than half the population of New York City in a landmass twice the size of New York State; Auckland, at 1m, isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. And then some of the city’s best design stores don’t seem to be investing in the local scene: international designers are the stock and trade of most of the city’s furniture and interior design retailers, at the expense of homegrown talent.

Nevertheless, Auckland–and the country as a whole–has a number of urban  charms that help to sustain an atmosphere of excitement and creativity, and those charms bear naming. The city’s built environment is truly uncanny: imagine Los Angeles, reconstructed on a 1:8 scale with fewer expressways and more oversize tropical flowers. The bulk of the city’s housing stock is little cottages in a kind of cutesy-fied carpenter’s Gothic, thrown together with California bungalows of sometimes doubtful verisimilitude. Kiwi architects, trained in the US in the early 20th century, brought back our West Coast vogue for Arts and Crafts-style ramblers, and proceeded to practice an improvised version well into the 1970s; the results are mixed, but always surprising.

This is even truer in the smaller southern city of Christchurch, which also harbors an intriguing creative scene. There the California-ness of the place is made even more dreamily unreal by the presence of a quaint late-19th century downtown (above) that looks something like Main Street, Disneyland. Christchurch has perhaps the oddest architectural back story of them all: founded by a bunch of Pre-Raphaelite religious zealots in the 1850s, the city was to be a re-establishment of the medieval English town order, lords, smithies, the whole bit, along with a bonafide Gothic revival architect to help set the right tone. (Did the Puritans bring an architect with them to Plymouth Rock? Very doubtful.) The city’s beautiful Neo-Gothic buildings are a testament to that heritage.

Contemporary buildings in New Zealand–notably the Christchurch Art Gallery by the Buchan Group, and the cluster of contemporary structures in Auckland’s new Viaduct District, which seems to be expanding daily–show how well the country has absorbed the glass-fronted iconic tendency that prevailed in international design over the last decade. Still, it would be refreshing to see a more regionalist bent, something better suited to the climate. On which point, a last word and a warning, lest this post be taken as an unconditional advertisement for the designer tourist: For some bizarre reason, homes in New Zealand are neither insulated nor well-heated, two things which are much missed in the chilly and damp winter and spring. If you’re an architect and you do go over there–and you should–see if you can do something about that.

And now, the New York Observor tells us, Nouvel and the project’s backers are fighting back.

Even as I write, Nouvel himself is appearing before a City Council sub-committee to second the request of developers Hines Interests to restore the excised portion of the tower. If built to full height, the building would be as tall as the Empire State Building; why such an extraordinary height should be necessary to the success of the design is unclear, but it will certainly be central to Nouvel’s case in the hearing this afternoon. In a rush to preempt him, allow me a few errant speculations on several aspects of this débâcle:

–The building looks pretty good: in the latest renderings, a web of skewed structural members traces a snaking patina up the long chrome face of the twoer, something like an expressionist revision of Chicago’s Hancock Center. Strange allure is Nouvel’s legerdemain; some scholars have noted his indebtedness to European nightclubs of the 1970′s. Geting something this compelling and original added to the New York skyline is worth it of itself to justify whatever height, and the design is assured enough to confirm that Nouvel knows what he’s about and should be trusted as regards the building’s particular dimensions. Let it go.

–And why not build something really tall in midtown? It’s midtown, and besides, Lower Manhattan will soon have its 1 World Trade Center (at least it looks that way), so why not make this a moment to affirm the power and possibilities of the vertical city? The lot is empty, so preservationists needn’t lose sleep; and there’s no chance that any building, however large, could change the character of such a complex and teeming neighborhood.

–But then there’s the unseemly stuff: The Hines Interests are cashing in here, because MoMA owes them big-time. Hines has underwritten a very large portion of the museum’s architectural program for years; they headed up the development of the new museum building earlier in the decade, and have built previous commercial projects (notably Cesar Pelli’s Museum Tower) on museum property. The additional floors won’t add any gallery space for the museum–the new galleries will be further down–but they will help fill Hines’ already ample coffers. Naturally MoMA, as owner, will also stand to benefit from the increased saleable space, but then we’ve reason to suspect what they’ll do with that money–such as lard their directors’ slush-funds.

–Final thought: the recent renovation of MoMA was successful as a design effort, but no devotee of the museum can help but miss its older, more intimate quarters. Even before that, it had been a long time since MoMA had the cozy clubbish feel it did at mid-century, but the last vestiges of that were wiped away in Taniguchi Yoshio’s revamp. The addtional gallery space in the Nouvel building will only add insult to injury–let the museum do more with less! And if the City Council won’t give back the missing inches, well, Hines can turn the would-be galleries into apartments to make up the lost revenue. I put the odds Nouvel will get his footage back at 50-50–and I’d say it makes very little difference either way.