Cincinnati is a pig's ear of a city. No matter how much signature architecture you throw at it, you're never going to turn it into a silk purse. Think of all the clichés of American provincial urbanism - the lifeless downtown, stalked by derelicts and panhandlers, the crumbling ghettos pressing in hard on the centre, the deadening eight-lane highways slicing it up, whole tracts of city flattened to make parking lots, a cluster of anodyne skyscrapers, some scattered historic fragments, a couple of sports stadia and of course a hell of a good conventional art museum, funded by people who live well outside. That's Cincinnati. It's by no means the worst city of its kind, it's just so depressingly recognizable. This is the context that Hadid had to build in.