It seems that certain operatives of Cablevision are publicly denouncing the proposed Jets stadium on the grounds that its design, by the illustrious local firm of Kohn Pedersen & Fox, is ugly. To which I would respond that anyone whose base of operations is Madison Square Garden, owned and run by Cablevision, has probably forfeited the right to have an opinion concerning the beauties of architectural form, let alone to criticize the architectural plans of anyone else.

As it happens, the Kohn Pedersen Fox stadium design is surely one of the best ever conceived for a sports arena. It puts to shame the odious Garden, that drab can designed by Charles Luckman & Associates back in 1968. And the renderings Cablevision unveiled last week, just under the deadline set by the MTA, show the spirit of Mr. Luckman has not yet died or, more precisely, been exorcised.

Towering over a very indifferent park is a motley mess that sets architecture back about 35 years, to the very time when the Garden was built. Two towers, bristling with cantilevered balconies, emerge from a misshapen, curry-colored base, to which are added a touch of mustard and some shavings of rust. It is the invention of Alex Krieger, principal of Chan Krieger and Associates and chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Whether a stadium is the best use that can be made of the Hudson Yards is an open question, though one that likely will be resolved one way or another by the end of this week. As for the Cablevision plan – even admitting that it is better than absolutely nothing, short of drilling for oil – this is about as bad as we could possibly do.

It may seem churlish to object to the plan as now conceived – since, of course, there is no chance in hell that it will ever be built. Indeed, we can fairly conjecture that that was never its purpose. The purpose was simply to bring it about, by any legal means, that the Jets stadium not become a reality.

To do this, however, and to appease public sentiment, Cablevision needed at least to pretend to have an alternative; hence this dream building that is not meant to have any reality but simply to exist as a vaporous thing that will advance the cause of never allowing a stadium to rise up so near to, and so much better than, the Garden. (That said, many a Manhattan development has actually been built on even less inspired principles.)

It must have seemed weird to Mr. Krieger to receive his marching orders from on high, in the full knowledge that his assignment was to create something so insubstantial that, next to it, Potemkin’s Village would look like the Kremlin. But then, that’s what happens when you have only eight minutes to knock out a design.

The important thing – I imagine the suits telling him, as they breathed down his neck – is to include grass, and, above all, blue sky in the rendering; their infallible marketing department had discovered that humans apparently go for that sort of thing. In the circumstances, it would be wryly amusing and no less than Cablevision deserves, if their offer were rejected on the basis of this plan – which was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place!

The plan, for the record, is to build 5,800 units of housing, as well as offices, an elementary school, a library, retail shops, and a hotel. “Mixed-use” is the buzzword of the moment, and Cablevision is invoking it constantly in connection with this project. But there is simply no way, on the basis of the images released, that a real and thriving community will emerge from this project – which they are calling “Hudson Gardens,” with its intimations of suburbia or even the Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Such being the case, one reads with amazement that Mr. Krieger fancies himself a disciple of Jane Jacobs: The project he has submitted would directly contravene everything for which Ms. Jacobs has ever stood. Built on a super block, it is basically a Corbusian tower in a park. The tower rises far above any possibility of street life, which in any case is held at bay by 5 acres of greenery that buffer it from the menace of city life.

Granted, Cablevision and Mr. Krieger were under the gun to churn this out, but it is quite clear that they have completely misunderstood the psychology of the postmodern New Yorker. If the New Yorker really wanted what this project supplies, he would move to the suburbs or to a retirement community in Miami.

What he really wants – and this is even truer of the foreigners who pay outlandish prices for our real estate – is a sense of stewing in the “citiness” of the city. They love the grime of the Meatpacking District, the East Village, and SoHo. This is precisely what is abolished in Cablevision’s plan, whose only recommendation is that it is better than nothing or than something even worse than nothing, which is what we have now.

While we’re at it, would it be irresponsible to float the idea of tearing down Madison Square Garden? There has been talk of this periodically over the years. Indeed, Frank Gehry was supposed at one point to build a skyscraper there in the form of a fish – a plan that, even if foolish, could hardly be worse than what we see today. I am not so practically minded as to suggest anything in place of the Garden. I merely imagine that the spectacle of its implosion would pep up a whole lot of New Yorkers.