For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

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.

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.

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.