TRAINWRECK!! How NOT to redesign a building!

This one will go down in the annals of NYC architectural all-time botches.  They've taken a fine old 1923 Midtown office building (The Newsweek Building, built as The General Motors Building--known for many years as the home of the late, lamented Coliseum Bookstore) and utterly destroyed it.  View the photos below, if you will, and then let's discuss:
The Newsweek Building (1775 Broadway), before...

....During.....


....and after, newly renamed "3 Columbus Circle":


It was supposed to end up looking like this....it doesn't.



While acknowledging that this was never one of New York's "great buildings," it was always a handsome, somewhat stolid masonry building that anchored the very busy corner of West 57th Street and Broadway.  The current owners of the building, The Moinian Group, have sunk more than $100 million into "modernizing" the facade, stripping the building of every bit of architectural detailing, then encasing the entire building in a reflective glass "curtain".  Which is fine, I guess, when the sunlight is just-so...but I walked by it in the early morning recently and the "curtain" was not reflective at all...and one could look right through to see the scarred, stripped facade of the old building right through the glass.  It's just bizarre.  They didn't enlarge the windows at all--you can see these poor little stripped windowsills peering through the glass.  It is so ugly that there is a movement underway to purchase the building in order to tear it to the ground.  That may just be an improvement, as in its current state, it's one of the most embarassingly amateurish "renovations" in New York City history.  It's now mired in bankruptcy, loan default and a basic, all-around shit-show.  I'm led to wonder, yet again, whether Landmarks Preservation or ANY city agency that's supposed to be in place to prevent such a disaster paid any attention at all when this plan was first presented? 

And what's more, it's not even ON Columbus Circle, so where do they get the "3 Columbus Circle" bit?  Is it considered okay to just arbitrarily re-name your address to whatever you want it to be?