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

A suburban mall turned vertical.

New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.

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

I try to do everything from thinking about big issues like how a building fits into the larger stream of architectural history to practical issues such as how it feels to navigate your way through its interior.

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.

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.