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

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

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.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

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.

I think it's necessary to evaluate a skyscraper at multiple scales, since that's how we experience it: from right next to it on the street to from across the river, as well as at all kinds of points in between. It's important to think of it as an element in a larger skyline, but also as an element in an immediate streetscape.

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.