When I first moved to Atlanta, in the early 1980s, the city was roughly the size of Baltimore. There were about 1.7 million people here. A huge crowd appeared outside the old Darlington sign on Peachtree to watch it tilt over and say "Atlanta's population now 2,000,000."

Today we're a metropolis of 4.5 million. We're Chicago size.

And the recent grand openings here -- Atlantic Station, the Aquarium, and especially the new High -- show we're going about doing everything Chicago-style and Chicago-sized.

The new High is a great example. The old building as a marvel when first built in 1983. It made designer Richard Meier a legend. It featured a grand four-story atrium, all in white, which became the focus of all the museum's greatest installations, as it was meant to be.

The picture to the right, however, was taken yesterday, inside that atrium. It's empty now. The whole building is secondary to the new wing.

The new wing (wings actually) are grander, with far more floor space. They can house Chicago-style exhibits, like the one currently on view on Andrew Wyeth. By that I mean that you walk from room-to-room to room and get lost, going back-and-forth among the paintings. You forget where you are, almost, because everything is enclosed. There's nothing of air and light in the space, as there is in the old High, where that atrium is always close by.

It's sad to see, in a way, given how Wyeth's work is all about the outdoors, and a real sense of place.

But it's the price that must be paid for an overweening civic ambition. That's always been Atlanta's claim to fame, the feature that has marked its rise for over a century, an overweening civic ambition. You could hear it in Henry Grady's New South speech, you could see it in Ivan Allen Sr.'s work, rising inside the ranks of the office products industry so he could bring its shows to Atlanta. You could see it in Mayor Hartsfield seeing a car track and feeling the airport inside it. It's the City Too Busy to Hate spiel and it's all over the ATL campaign of Dallas Austin and Mayor Franklin.

Not, as they say, that there's anything wrong with any of that. But be careful what you wish for.

Chicago fell hard, in the 1930s, and never recovered. I was in Houston when it was at the height of its ambition, in the 1970s, and it fell hard. You try too hard to be New York and only two things can happen. You succeed and lose your soul, as Los Angeles did. Or you fail, and then have to go about figuring out what that soul was.

When we do, I think we'll find it in what's now an abandoned atrium.