Why in Canadian cities do we build so little of the new? Why are almost all our houses and office buildings copies of ancient styles, or just featureless boxes? Isn't this North America -- the society of frontiers? Isn't this the 21st century?

An instructive tale from New Jersey: Minoru Yamasaki's design for the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University is an ostentatiously kitsch but painfully seductive building. The gleaming white structure is a modernist version of the Parthenon, and appeared as a glaring exception to the lovely gothic style that dominated Princeton's campus until the 1960s, when Mr. Yamasaki's apparition appeared.

But Mr. Yamasaki didn't offer something new in creating a difference. Yamasaki's Parthenon actually set kitsch up against kitsch at Princeton -- neo-Greek versus Gothic. Both had emotional and aesthetic appeal, and neither gave any sign of creativity.

Now the university is debating much more compelling options: the construction of yet another pleasing monument to kitsch, and something made entirely of our own time.

Frank Gehry is designing a new science library for Princeton using his characteristic curvaceous lines and bold materials enclosing womb-like spaces, creating luminous volumes that bespeak the technology and sensibility of our own age. His buildings are not modelled on archetypes from the past, as wonderful as those archetypes may be. Mr. Gehry's late-career buildings will likely qualify as art -- breakthroughs, innovations of high intellectual quality that stand the test of time. (The Art Gallery of Ontario recently announced that Mr. Gehry will design its new Thomson extension in Toronto.)

Kitsch is something quite different. True kitsch is the replication of excellence -- even art -- from previous ages, but conspicuously out of context in time and space. A perfect copy of Michelangelo's statue of David in my front yard in Toronto would qualify as kitsch by this definition.

More provocatively, kitsch would also be the composition of Beethoven's Tenth Symphony, written by an acolyte in 2003 and premiered in Edmonton. Even the Tenth Symphony written by a resurrected Beethoven would qualify as kitsch because it only mimicked a form whose time is past and largely exhausted.

(But no. A resurrected Beethoven would do something quite different, having caught up on the history of music since he died. After all, Richard Wagner gave up on the symphonic form after hearing Beethoven's Ninth, which he described as unsurpassable. Looking back, Beethoven would have to deal with Wagner's own brilliance, not to mention Stravinksy, jazz and Broadway. Beethoven would shock us with his Tenth in 2003: Art requires a breaking of the peace.)

Simultaneous with Mr. Gehry's library, Princeton is constructing a large residential building in the classic Gothic style, designed by Demetri Porphyrios. He has called for use of the same quarried stone -- argillite -- that graces so many earlier romantic piles across the campus.

Whitman College -- named after eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has contributed $45-million to its construction -- will house 500 students and feature the same quadrangles, pointed arches and vines that loom so large in the affections of those who have studied there. Princeton officials say this new Gothic leviathan will actually maintain the balance between kitsch and new architecture at Princeton, where several other contemporary buildings have appeared. The kitsch represents the debt to the past, the Gehry-era buildings the promise to the future. It's a stretch, but a good step forward from the Yamasaki days.

It so happens that Mr. Yamasaki also designed the World Trade Center for the New York Port Authority, which sought an explosion of office space to offset the economic decline of Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s. He met the program aggressively with those blunt, iconic 110-storey towers perched over 16 acres of "urban renewal." And now, with the towers' disappearance, New York is considering what to do in their place, with the stimulus of a global architectural competition.

Like Princeton -- like Toronto -- New York faces choices between replication and thematically powerful bridges to the new. The seven architect finalists include Norman Foster, Rafael Vinoly and Daniel Libeskind (who is architect for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto). And the debate revolves around similar fissures: respect for what was, the potential of what is, and wonder in what is yet to be.

As individuals, we encounter these same dynamic forces every day of our lives, and often bring them to consciousness as "resolutions" in January. The status quo generally prevails, whatever our intentions or its flaws. The happiest new year is one where just a shard of art comes into every person's life. May you have one of those. May we.
William Thorsell is director and CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum.