While some throw curves, a light motif stands out

New and sometimes crazy shapes for buildings became a theme of architecture in 2004. Boston had its Stata Center at MIT, and in Venice, the Architectural Biennale emphasized what some call ''blob" architecture: buildings in curvy organic forms made possible by the computer.

In New York, controversy swirled around the Freedom Tower for the World Trade Center site, a clumsy design that looked like a shard of broken glass, by two architects who couldn't agree about anything.

In London came the opening of an office building called 30 St Mary Axe -- designed by Lord Norman Foster, the architect for additions to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts -- a 40-story tower that looked so much like an upright pickle that the public nicknamed it ''the Gherkin."

There were less egocentric trends, too. The movement toward so-called ''green architecture" -- buildings designed to use less energy and contribute less to global warming -- continued to grow.

So did the campaign against suburban sprawl, thinly spread-out, energy-consumptive development that eats up forest and farmland and destroys natural habitat. One study noted that densely built Manhattan is by far the greenest community in the United States, as measured by energy consumption per capita.

Another healthy trend was a movement to abandon the cube farm and instead create pleasant environments for office workers, with natural daylight and informal places for meeting and socializing. Another was a continuing, ever-growing interest in city living.

My picks for best of the year:

The Genzyme Center in Cambridge, by Stefan Behnisch of Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner of Germany, with Next Phase Studios of Boston, is the headquarters of an international pharmaceutical company that began life on an upper floor in Boston's Chinatown. Unremarkable on the exterior, the Genzyme Center indoors is the best modern office space ever built in the Boston area. Natural light, bounced around delightfully by mirrors and prisms, floods and enlivens a 13-story atrium where you walk and climb among hanging gardens. Everything is open and transparent. You can see much of the inside from outdoors, workers can see one another, and at night the whole building glows like a beacon. The Genzyme Center is also probably the most ''green" building yet built in this region, with energy consumption predicted to be a third lower than in conventional office space.

The most talked-about building of the year was certainly the remarkable Stata Center at MIT, home to teaching and research in the ''intelligence sciences." It's the work of famed California architect Frank Gehry, who is known for free-form, billowing buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The Stata looks as if it's been hit by an earthquake. Its parts tilt and crash drunkenly into one another. Filled with odd shapes, bright colors, and light from unexpected sources, the Stata is a delightful but sometimes disorienting funhouse to visit. Whether it will succeed in its primary purpose, which is to get researchers from different disciplines to meet, mix, and inspire one another, is something we'll know only after more time has passed.

Building H at Northeastern is an astonishingly slim, crisp, luminous, elegant 18-story tower of dorm suites, plus a few classrooms. The rear of the tower is solid, and the front part, facing north, is glass. The rear peels back from the glass at the top of the building, leaving the glass as a free-standing tower that seems to signal like a lantern toward the Museum of Fine Arts across Huntington Avenue. The architect is William Rawn, the master planner of Northeastern's new West Campus, where he also designed a pleasant quad of curvy orange-brick dormitories. Building H is a daring step forward in the work of this prominent Boston architect.

I'm not crazy about the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi with the New York firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. It's a rambling pile of anonymous galleries with track lighting and white walls that look too much like projection screens. It's remarkably lacking in fresh ideas. But Taniguchi's love of diaphanous surfaces and unexpected transparencies can be seductive, and MoMA is an important building that everyone should see and judge for themselves. And revisiting the great collection is like a family reunion.

This was the year we got our first real look at the swath of open space that's been created by the removal of the overhead Central Artery. I don't think anyone predicted how huge and powerful this space would feel. It's stunning. Standing in it, you are in a city that has suddenly been opened up and made visible. It will be many years before this space finds its final form, but it is going to transform Boston forever. And before it was all removed, the wreckage of the Artery made wonderful urban sculpture.

I put Toronto-based planner Ken Greenberg on this list last year just because he was hired by the city, before he'd actually done anything. Since then he's come up with a brilliant plan to integrate the development of the Artery parkland with the city around it. The politics and finances will be tough, but the ideas are so persuasive that maybe they will be, at least in part, implemented in years to come.

Most books on architecture are either glossy coffee-table entertainments or too specialized for the general reader. These two are neither: Ada Louise Huxtable's ''Frank Lloyd Wright" relates the amazing life of America's greatest architect in a short, fair, and readable volume. Paul Goldberger's ''Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York" sorts out the complicated politics and aesthetics of the debate over what to put on the site of the World Trade Center.

I first saw ''My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, the great architect Louis Kahn, in his New York studio in the spring of 2003. Nathaniel Kahn was unsure what to do with it and asked me if I thought it would be welcome at schools of architecture. A few months later, it was a national success and an Oscar nominee. It's the brilliant, moving story of Kahn's search to understand a father he barely knew -- a father with one wife, two mistresses, and three families.

I've only listed nine ''bests" because I want to save my tenth space for a ''worst." This has to be the Big Dig tunnels, with their cheesy, patched-together appearance, the walls strung with ugly cables, and the ceilings that look as if they're made of tarpaper. That's what we get for our $15 billion. Oh, that and leaks.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.