I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?

On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.

I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.

Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

A suburban mall turned vertical.