August 31, 1986

If there is any attitude that characterizes this moment in architecture, it is an indifference toward the idea of urbanism, a feeling that individual parts matter a great deal more than wholes. Our buildings are generally not made to be part of a larger place; however well designed, they are dropped in, one beside the other, with almost nothing to tie them together. They are prima donnas, not ensembles. Against this backdrop Battery Park City, the immense complex moving steadily toward completion on a 92-acre landfill site along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, is close to a miracle. For here there is a sense of place, and it is a powerful and generally convincing one. It is not perfect - but it is far and away the finest urban grouping since Rockefeller Center, and one of the better pieces of urban design of modern times. That it was built under the aegis of a public authority operating within the political thickets of both New York City and New York State makes this success more remarkable still. For here Battery Park City disproves yet another assumption that has become part of today's building ethos, which is the notion that only the private sector matters - that the public sector is utterly unable to get projects off the ground, and only private developers can accomplish anything significant.

When the city arranged a lucrative package of tax abatements and low-cost energy to keep Shearson Lehman/American Express from building a computer center and office tower in New Jersey, officials said their main hope was to preserve jobs. But in selling the company a vacant two-block site bounded by West, North Moore, Greenwich and Hubert Streets, the city also appears to have revitalized the western edge of TriBeCa, an area of many vacant loft buildings.

''It's 1986. Do you know where your class of 1991 is?''- Theme of an upcoming college and university advancement development conference. LONG ISLAND'S colleges and universities, facing another year of declining enrollment and economic uncertainty, are doing everything from advertising to reorganizing themselves to create a greater demand for their product. Schools are shifting curriculums, reaching out to older students, and building new facilities and fixing up old ones. While some schools are moving toward tougher, more structured curriculums, others are expanding their programs in popular areas like computers, gearing courses to meet the demands of local industry.

December will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Federation of Labor. As the labor movement prepares to celebrate Labor Day this year, however, unease permeates its ranks. While 35 percent of the work force was organized in the 1950's, today the figure is only 18 percent - a postwar low -and there is no evidence the slide has ceased. So upsetting is this downward trend that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. issued a self-evaluation a year ago actually suggesting, among other things, that some working people might feel more comfortable joining independent associations rather than their industry's union. Has the labor movement lost that much of its drive and vision, critics of the report asked. Are American workers, in the words of the old organizing song, that antagonistic to the idea of ''talkin' union?''

Tudor City, a quiet enclave of English Cottage architecture built in the 1920's in midtown Manhattan, has been anything but peaceful. Tenants of the U-shaped complex have been fighting for about 15 years to preserve two small parks as part of the complex's current conversion to cooperatives.