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 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.

A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

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?

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.

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

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.