Finalist: Justin Davidson of New York magazine

Hudson Yards is a billionaire’s fantasy city and you never have to leave — provided you can pay for it

On a day when the cold makes the skyline snap into focus as if you’re seeing it through new lenses, Hudson Yards seems more virtual than real. Jagged and reflective, the five new towers have a high-definition clarity that the physical world mostly lacks. At a distance, the tallest looks like a high-browed robotic duck with a beak so generous you could almost land a helicopter on it. That’s the outdoor observation deck, which juts out 65 feet and comes to a point 1,100 feet above the street. From here — or better yet, from the set of bleachers that allows you to peer over the glass railing — I can look down on the Empire State Building. I can behold the widescreen, high-res view of a New York more orderly and wondrous than the one most of us live in. The space won’t open for another year, but I can already see the over-the-top weddings in the party room upstairs, where guests can dance far, far above the stink and mess below. An adventurous few will be able to take a dedicated elevator even further up to the pointed peak, don a harness, climb out on a catwalk in the open air, and howl into the wind.

On March 15, after 12 years of planning and six of construction, the Related Companies (which is actually just one mammoth real-estate company) will open the gates to its new $25 billion enclave, an agglomeration of supertall office towers full of lawyers and hedge-funders, airborne eight-figure apartments, a 720,000-square-foot shopping zone, and a gaggle of star-chef restaurants. When the rest of it is finished — when the remaining rectangle of exposed rail yards between 11th and 12th Avenues is covered by a deck and more residential towers — the whole 28-acre shebang will be bigger than the United Nations, the World Trade Center, or Rockefeller Center and physically vaster, more populous, and more expensive than any private development in the country. Besides being big, Hudson Yards represents something fundamentally new to New York. It’s a one-shot, supersized virtual city-state, plugged into a global metropolis but crafted to the specifications of a single boss: Related’s chairman, Stephen Ross. (You can read about him here.)

Each time I approach, I feel a volatile mix of wonder and dejection roil in my chest. New York can absorb even this, I tell myself. Offices will hum with necessary invention, the plaza will teem, and the towers will settle into the accommodating skyline. The complex redeems an area that until recently most New Yorkers barely knew existed, a great pit full of resting trains open to the sky. There will be jobs, yogawear, art shows, tapas, even some affordable apartments. New York isn’t done building towers, and unlike the skinny plutocratvilles going up on 57th Street, new office buildings are a necessity, one where tens of thousands of New Yorkers will spend their days (and some will work through the night). Who’s to cavil when the money flows? The asset-management team BlackRock signed up to spend $1.25 billion in rent over 20 years. The retail complex will have at least six places where you can spend five figures on a wristwatch (Patek Philippe, Rolex, Cartier, Watches of Switzerland, Piaget, Tiffany). The 101st-floor party space, surely to be among the priciest available, will be the place to host the most ostentatious vodka launch in town. They’ve paved a parking lot and put up a high-rise paradise.

Yet I can’t help feeling like an alien here, as though I’ve crossed from real New York, with all its jangling mess, into a movie studio’s back-lot version. Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed. This para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics — no memories at all. In the renderings that Related uses to market this new world, just about every one of the digital people strolling through the virtual cityscape is young, thin, able-bodied, and white. It strikes me as profoundly strange, this need to re-create an uncitylike city, so aloof from the porous, welcoming, spontaneous metropolis we like to think we inhabit. The suburbs have become more mixed, trafficky, crime-ridden, and complicated, and so, if you need exclusivity at all costs, an urban enclave with a quick elevator ride to the stratosphere looks especially appealing. I suppose this apotheosis of blank-slate affluence is someone’s fantasy of the 21st-century city, but it isn’t mine.

Again and again, I have wondered who wanted it to be like this, and when it became a foregone outcome. We’ve been headed here for a long time, as the city has become more moneyed and the only retail stores that seem sustainable are those of luxury labels. A crowd of gifted architects worked hard to figure out how gargantuan buildings and cliffs of glass could form a place — a stretch of city where human beings feel like they belong. Kohn Pedersen Fox designed 10 and 30 Hudson Yards, the faceted, shingled-glass skyscrapers flanking their shopping mall, with interiors by Elkus Manfredi. Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group designed the tubular apartment building at 15 Hudson Yards and its conjoined performance venue, the Shed. Two more towers, 55 by KPF with Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, and 35, an office-hotel-residential combo by David Childs and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, loom over the plaza by Nelson Byrd Woltz and a bucket-shaped latticelike objet by Thomas Heatherwick that is, for now, called the Vessel. Separately, these architects — most of them, anyway — came up with sensitive and sophisticated designs. Together, they created the opposite of their intention. Instead of an organic extension of the midtown fabric, they produced a corporate city-state, branded from sidewalk to spire.

That brand is perfectionism. At a time when the most ordinary aspects of urban living, like taking the subway or steering past trash bags piled on the sidewalk, are so many frustration bombs lying in wait, Related promises a nuisance-free zone. Snow will not be permitted to accumulate on the sidewalks or humans to sleep in doorways. Door handles will be obliged to gleam at all times. If you wonder whether a real-estate company can be trusted to maintain those standards, consider that Ross himself is moving to a penthouse in his new fiefdom, and so is another top Related executive, Jeff Blau, the CEO. The company they run is coming with them too.

I’ve visited the construction site several times, and circled it many more, watching the towers lumber toward the sky and this improbable mirage take shape. Now, as workers rush to lay the final paving stones and finish wiring the lights, I tour it with Jay Cross, the project’s hands-on chief. I am in awe of the sheer managerial omniscience that allows Cross to grasp, predict, and control every aspect of construction, from the colossal to the picayune. Even if the whole East Coast goes dark, he tells me, the site’s co-generation plant will kick in within milliseconds, so that multimillion-dollar electronic transactions can continue whizzing around the globe without a hiccup. When the rains come and the waters rise, submarine doors will close around elevator machinery and fuel tanks. This shining city on a deck is built to withstand a wide range of plagues.

Cross is equally caught up in surfaces. He shows me the curved, Italian-made tracks for the elevator that snake up inside Heatherwick’s interwoven collection of staircases. He points out the custom steel joints sleek enough to be abstract sculptures, lighting strips embedded in handrails, pavers arranged in a mosaic of different grays. Architecture is composed of such minutiae, and, in a way, it’s reassuring to see a control-freak client at work, demanding equal levels of obsessiveness from a varied team of architects. As we walk through the lobby of 30 Hudson Yards, Cross reels off a list of sumptuous finishes as though he’s reciting the specials at an exotically unaffordable restaurant: fumed larch, book-matched Ombra di Caravaggio marble (smoky gray with ocher veins), a spritz of limestone, and bronzed aluminum. (Or is it anodized branzino? I forget.) The wavy walls of the lobby coffee shop appear to be clad in melted chocolate.

Ross wants his tenants to feel as though they occupy the best building in the best neighborhood in the best borough of the greatest city in the world. The bestness is all. Still, this is a privatized idyll, where the concept of public good stops at the property line. West 31st and 32nd Streets dead-end at the shopping mall’s forbidding wall along Tenth Avenue. When an architect agitated for a more lavish cladding, a Related executive waved him away. “Who’s going to see it?” he asked. For the developers, the towers gather round a central stage. The rest of the city is its back-of-house.

In this West Side Westworld, every aspect of the experience is curated by an unseen hand. Everything is engineered to suck passersby onto the property and keep them there, spending money, as long as possible. There are no storefronts in this version of New York, only indoor pathways through the seven-story shopping center. Visitors can browse at Van Cleef & Arpels as they wait for their table at Thomas Keller’s TAK Room or their time slot on the observation deck. For many office workers, the shortest distance from subway to desk leads past Tiffany.

It’s possible to live a full and varied life here — to sleep, put in an hour at the gym, bring the kids to school, drop the dog off at day care, go to the office, shop, eat out, visit a museum, and catch a show — without so much as crossing the street. That kind of total-service completeness has been a goal of smart-growth urbanists for many years, but it’s one thing to apply those aspirations to a semi-citified development around a suburban transit station, in the hope that it won’t go dead after rush hour. It’s a very different, and more disquieting, achievement to create a high-rise district on a plinth so sealed-off and yachtlike that nobody need ever leave.

There’s nothing new about the idea of a blank-slate city. The Romans built their gridded garrisons at the edges of the empire. Chandigarh and Brasilia were designed as complete capitals. Our own Rockefeller Center is an obvious predecessor. In the past few decades, advances in engineering and logistics, combined with a worldwide market for offices and high-end residences, have given real-estate companies and bureaucracies the ability to plan, finance, link, build, and populate tens of millions of square feet all at once. Hudson Yards may stand out in New York, but it fits right into a global context where new cities and urban enclaves come on line with frightening rapidity and, at the same time, authorities set aside multidecade, multibillion-dollar budgets to urbanize on an ever larger scale.

Starting in the 1980s, 97 acres of deteriorating London Docklands metamorphosed into the office district of Canary Wharf, linked to the rest of the city by ferry and light rail (and eventually by the Crossrail commuter train). The closest precedent to Hudson Yards is Tokyo’s 28-acre Roppongi Hills, which was developed by the Stephen Ross of Japan, Minoru Mori, and opened in 2003. It took Mori 17 years to assemble the parcels in the heart of Tokyo; Related slurped up its rail yards in a single gulp. In Abu Dhabi, Foster + Partners designed Masdar City as the zero-carbon metropolis of the future, and though the tens of thousands of residents it was designed for haven’t shown up, leaving the showcase area looking prematurely ghostly, it has turned out to be more of a lab and exhibition center for such purportedly planet-saving technologies as automatic shuttle buses and plant-based jet fuel. And all of those ambitions look puny next to the Chinese government’s plan for Jing-Jin-Ji, a metropolitan area larger than New England, which would swallow Beijing and have a projected population of 130 million.

After World War II, architects, planners, and politicians came to a consensus on the need to house the poor in modern, hygienic housing and to construct expansive campuses for education and the arts. Those projects came bundled with blind spots and racial prejudice, but they were powered by a kind of democratic idealism. The great promise of Hudson Yards was that a whole new zone of the postindustrial metropolis could be manufactured from scratch without the burdens of a messy past. There were no residents to displace, no favorite bookstores to bulldoze or preservationists to placate. Here was a chance to dream up the metropolis of the future afresh. But the political climate and economic imperatives short-circuited those fantasies and we got a bloated simulacrum instead. That failure to learn from past blunders, or to strive for a more equitable and humane city, constitutes a massive institutionalized failure of imagination decades in the making.

In 1974, the West Side’s outer edge was occupied by a largely dormant, two-mile-long train yard headed for liquidation by the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. But nobody wanted it. Trains still had to keep running through at least part of the area, so the only way to turn it into buildable acreage was to cover it with a gigantic, prohibitively expensive platform. One person expressed an interest and took out an option to buy the land: the son of a Queens-based builder of middle-class apartments. Donald J. Trump eventually let that option lapse and brokered the state’s purchase of land for a convention center, offering to forgo his fee and build it at cost if he could name it … you guessed it, the Trump Center. The state said no and named it after Senator Jacob Javits instead.

Midtown has been pushing west toward the river since the 1950s, but without a platform atop them, the yards stood in the way of the city’s insatiable need for more residences, more businesses, more cubicles, and more places to eat lunch. The hollers got louder in June 2001, when a panel convened by Senator Chuck Schumer calculated that the city would need to build 60 million square feet of new office space in the coming decades to compete with fast-moving global centers like London and Hong Kong. Three months later, terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, wiping out another 13 million square feet.

Soon after Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor, in January 2002, his deputy Daniel Doctoroff revived his dormant fantasy of landing the Olympic Games. To get them, New York needed a new stadium, and Doctoroff calculated that putting it on the Far West Side could lure the Jets back to the city, serve as an expansion for the chronically cramped Javits Center, and stimulate that elusive burst of development. In pursuit of that vision, the city rezoned not just the rail yards but a much vaster area, from 30th to 43rd Streets, west of Eighth Avenue. It also raised $2.4 billion to extend the No. 7 line. The Far West was this new city’s most promising frontier because, at least in the popular imagination, there was nothing there. Colonizing that unwelcoming terrain meant overwhelming it with skyscrapers — lots of them. “The key question was: How much could you accommodate?” Doctoroff recalls.

From the vantage point of 2019, it seems as though New York has been on a three-decade binge of growth, gentrification, and ever-rising real-estate prices. But 17 years ago, Bloomberg and his lieutenants were haunted by its fragility, the terrible ease with which it could sink back into 1970s-style dysfunction. To them, cities were like sharks: They could decline or grow but never stay still. And as veterans of the business world, they shared an ingrained belief in the superior efficiency of private companies. “The private sector knows best how to build and how to make money. If at all possible, what we [government] should do is get out of the way,” said Mayor Ed Koch in 1987, and nearly 20 years later, Bloomberg and Doctoroff agreed. Manhattan, they thought, should be capitalism’s most spectacular creation.

In the end, the stadium idea and the Olympic dream both died, but not before opening the door to development on a Babylonian scale. With politicians and editorialists focused on the stadium, the city quietly rezoned the West Side for a city the size of downtown Seattle.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg hammered out a deal. The MTA, which owned the yards, wanted as much money as it could get and had no interest in building anything. The city brokered the sale of development rights, which Tishman Speyer won. But the sale fell through, and Related quickly stepped in with $1 billion. A few months later, the financial crisis pummeled the world and developers everywhere hunted frantically for rocks to climb under. Related held firm.

Doctoroff, now CEO of the urban tech company Sidewalk Labs, looks approvingly out at the site from his office at 10 Hudson Yards. “It’s in a long line of great spaces that will define this city, consistent with what we envisioned,” he says. “The basic principles haven’t changed.”

There is no more virgin territory in New York, no vast tract that can be bulldozed by fiat. Instead there is the air above dirty and complicated installations. At the West Side yards, train traffic could never be shut down during construction, columns had to be threaded among the tracks, prodigious amounts of heat had to be vented, and preparations had to be made for the Gateway Tunnel under the Hudson, just in case the federal government ever decides to fund it. Since there was nowhere to bury all the ugly, bulky hardware (sewage pipes, foundations, water mains), it all had to be packed into the seven-foot depth of a platform jacked up 25 feet or so above the Earth. Hudson Yards is a garden of levitating towers. To the Bloomberg administration, it was clear that only a major developer could raise the capital and cope with the technical challenges to get the project done.

“We got really lucky that Steve Ross had a passion for this,” Doctoroff says. “He had an organization that was capable of executing it on every level, from the engineering to the marketing. Related was probably the only developer in the world that could have pulled this off.”

Architecture, like politics and war, springs from a million separate decisions made within the context of vast historical forces, decisions that can seem freer or more meaningful than they really are. At Hudson Yards, the path to the ribbon-cutting followed an inexorable trajectory based on impregnable financial logic. Underutilized space must be reclaimed for its highest and best use. The MTA needed cash. Costs were high, so potential profits had to be too. The most efficient way to finance and engineer the project was to hand it off to a single developer, who was only ever going to build a city as a luxury product. Each decision made the next one essentially foreordained.

At times, that relentless march of circumstance can produce results that look insane or visionary, depending on the month. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 recession and executed during the boom that followed, the megadevelopment opens onto a troubling future. The market for ultradeluxe condos is sagging, and we’ll see whether that’s one of the shocks that Hudson Yards is built to withstand. A dozen years ago, it seemed obvious that retail would prop up a shaky market for office space. Now the opposite is true. The 720,000-square-foot mall comes online even as storefronts are shuttering all over New York and Amazon threatens the whole concept of entering a shop with money and walking out with a shopping bag. On the other hand, businesses that were once squeamish about relocating to an uncertain frontier zone are now gobbling up square footage. Companies like Coach, L’Oréal, Warner Media, Wells Fargo, and Boston Consulting Group will cohabit with creations of the millennial boom like Stonepeak, and the demand for office space seems likely to outpace the current glut.

All those vicissitudes and contingencies don’t matter much to the buildings once they’re up. The confluence of history, politics, and money has yielded an acropolis of global capitalism, an elevated monumental complex that will endure long after the faith has been forgotten.

Walk down most Manhattan avenues and your eyes rarely drift up beyond the first couple of stories; it is entirely possible to stride right past the Empire State Building and hardly notice it’s there. Hudson Yards confronts you with its ostentatious verticality. That’s because the plaza allows you the room to step back and look up toward the O of sky outlined by the towers’ tips. To temper that repetitive upward thrust, Ross demanded that the architects he hired forge a cogent composition out of disparate designs.

The problem is that each project has a separate set of ironclad givens and follows its own internal logic. William Pedersen, the co-founder of KPF, and Marianne Kwok, one of the firm’s directors, sit me down at a conference table with a scale model of Hudson Yards and make it clear that the glass façades, the massive floor plates, the distance from window to elevator core, and the resulting form all flow directly from the tenants’ needs.

Still, there’s a community to build. “Tall buildings look like a bunch of people standing around a cocktail party. Everything we do is about creating gestures of connection,” Pedersen says. And so his firm nudged two of those isolated hulks, Nos. 10 and 30, into a relationship of sorts. They angle in opposite directions, as if facing off at arms’ length in a stately tango. In its eagerness to communicate, the shorter of the pair, 10 Hudson Yards, gesticulates hectically in all directions. It’s an à-la-carte structure dictated by the varying desires of tenants: a huge floor plate for one, a more modest floor plate for another, a separate campus-within-a-building for Coach, views all around. At its base, the building ducks and dodges at its chamfered corner as if to avoid being tagged out. It leaps out of the way of the High Line, which swings beneath it toward the soon-to-open Spur. At the corner of Tenth Avenue and 30th Street, the atrium sucks in its belly to leave room for a plaza out front. The result is a skyscraper that looks as though it were welded together from chunks of other skyscrapers.

Pedersen and Kwok went to enormous lengths to root their architecture in the borough and, on those blocks, to continue a lifelong concern with helping towers “become social participants in the life of cities,” as Pedersen puts it. And yet, in the end, their designs are more profoundly shaped by larger forces: the overwhelming need to make New York a node along the migratory routes of money. Reflective, slope-walled, fat-bottomed towers like KPF’s are the physical traces of a worldwide electronic economy.

Whether the development feels more like a high-rise island or a continuous patch of Manhattan will largely depend on the parts where there are no buildings at all. More than half the site is public space — or, to be precise, privately owned public space (POPS), the kind of hybrid that feels utterly open and democratic until a private security guard informs you that you’ve just violated one of the owner’s policies. As soon as the landscape-architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz got the job of stitching a bunch of glass hulks together, its leader, Thomas Woltz, began quietly resisting the rigid geometries, inhuman scale, perpetual shadows, hard surfaces, and self-absorption. He has made the most of his minimal set of tools: pavers, plants, walls, and benches. From above — the restaurant terraces, say — the pavers form a series of variously shaped ellipses in degrees of gray, swooping like electrons around a nucleus. On one side, a dense mini-forest borders on West 33rd Street. On the other, parallel rows of black-gum trees, their branches sticking straight out from the trunk as if they were doing calisthenics, line up along gently arcing granite terraces. (Just to make sure they would perform as advertised, Ross insisted that Woltz take him on a tree-sighting safari around New York.)

The slope, curves, steps, and benches, the canopy of trees and woodland undergrowth, all mitigate the site’s diamond-edged immensity. “The pavement will be perfect. The benches will be clean. The trash will be picked up. But the plantings add up to a layered forest from ground cover to canopy, an exuberant horticulture that’s thick and full and rich. That’s a nice counterpoint to the tightness of the rest of the site,” he says. Still, he acknowledges, “there’s only so much a 50-foot tree can do to soften a 1,200-foot building. So I focus on the dialogue between the person and the tree — the human space beneath a horticultural ceiling.”

It’s an artificial kind of nature Woltz has fashioned, a highly engineered landscape on a seven-foot-thick platform. Since the trains below exhale a tree-killing heat, he got engineers from Arup to design a cooling system that would keep the meticulously formulated soil at a steady 70 degrees. The plantings have to withstand near-constant shade from the behemoths all around. Woltz aims to create delight within these extreme constraints. “I hope the public loves it. I hope they feel, This is for you, folks. It’s well crafted and well maintained and there’s plenty of room for everyone to have a seat and enjoy.” It will be months before he can know whether his wish has come true; no park should be forced to make a winter debut, as this one has been.

And no park should be forced to share its debut with the development’s preposterous centerpiece, an Instagram-ready tchotchke, 15 stories high and, at $200 million, as costly as a regional hospital. Heatherwick’s Vessel mushrooms up and out over the central plaza, inviting visitors to climb it, watch others climb it, or take an elevator up to a landing, then come back down. The advance hype doesn’t prepare you for a structure quite this large, shiny, and extravagantly pointless. Its stainless-steel skin gleams russet like polished copper but won’t weather or lose its gloss. From the beginning, Ross declared his desire for an artwork big and splashy enough to focus the whole development. Not a clock or an obelisk — how about a botanical puppy, say, or a Chicago-style shiny kidney bean? Ross wanted something bolder, an artwork he wouldn’t have to warn people off of. Instead, Heatherwick’s piece functions as its own sign: PLEASE CLIMB ON THE SCULPTURE.

Stairs can be social spaces. The architects of the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library lifted those institutions above Fifth Avenue by means of imposing, processional staircases, but the city’s democratic culture eventually appropriated them as hangouts. Visitors use them to roost and recover. Even in winter there’s always a scattering of hardy types flaunting their endurance by seeing how long they can relax. In the past couple of decades, New York has become a city of sittable stairs: the scarlet staircase at Times Square, which functions as both stage and parquet, the lounging bleachers in front of Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, atop Pier 17, or at the water’s edge in Brooklyn Bridge Park. But Heatherwick’s honeycomb doesn’t really allow for loitering, only a steady trudge up, down, or all around. In disdainful compliance with the law, elevators deposit visitors with disabilities on a landing, where they can take a look but have nowhere else to go except back down. In theory the weave of 154 staircases and 80 landings offers thousands of possible routes, but in practice they are all endlessly the same, like the ramparts in Escher’s hermetic guard tower. You’ll need a timed ticket to go up. The Vessel embodies the aesthetic of hucksterism: It’s a staircase that takes you nowhere, clad in fake copper that never gets old, taking over a public space that’s actually private.

Ross has said he wants his Basket o’ Staircases to be New York’s Eiffel Tower or Gateway Arch (he used to compare it to the Trevi Fountain), and he is no doubt brimming with magnanimous feeling. “No one has ever given a gift like this,” he crowed to Fortune in 2016. He may be right. There are not many opportunities to erect such a grotesque monument to a rich man’s vanity.

There is one grain of unpredictability in Related’s grand oyster, one hope for humanism at Hudson Yards: the Shed, a lavishly funded but endearingly weird headquarters of interdisciplinary art. When the city zoned the site, it held back one spot on the platform for a cultural building to be placed right on 30th Street, where the High Line jogs out toward the Hudson. Bloomberg wanted a new organization that would add to the cultural life of the city, not just move it around. The architects Elizabeth Diller and David Rockwell, leaders of separate firms, came up with both the idea for the institution and the building’s design. A packed stack of galleries, theaters, and performance spaces slips into the base of a residential high-rise, making efficient use of all those unsaleable lower floors. It’s not an easeful relationship. At the tower’s base a great steel mouth gapes, as if to swallow (or regurgitate) the icy cube of the Shed. A puffy, quilted sheath slides over that glass-walled core like a box made of Bubble Wrap. Depending on the event, the outer layer can either be tucked away against the tower or roll out on great steel wheels to enclose a square of the plaza. The space will open April 5 with a five-night multi-genre spectacle surveying the history of African-American music, curated by Quincy Jones and directed by Steve McQueen. Whatever else it achieves, the Shed will draw audiences and artists who might otherwise never go near Hudson Yards.

Bloomberg’s aspirations, Diller and Rockwell’s design, and Related’s priorities fit together with startling neatness. From a developer’s point of view, the Shed is a unique amenity, a museum–cum–concert venue steps from your office or kitchen. The more distinctive its productions, the better the bragging rights. At the same time, though, contemporary arts institutions, unlike real-estate developers, have a high tolerance for failure and unpredictability. The Shed will defy Ross’s craving for control and good taste, because artists can be loud, confrontational, vulgar, and crusading — all fine local qualities that clash with the Related brand. In the end, the Shed may turn out to be New York’s embassy to the principality of Hudson Yards.

In my more dyspeptic moments, I wonder what Hudson Yards portends for New York’s future. Today it feels like the last spasm of the Bloomberg era, seductive and smooth and substantial, the home of some finely provocative art but fundamentally a grand gift of urban space to the global elite. Will it become a bastion of a Gilded Age that has already started to wane or the unavoidable model for the next megadevelopment and the one after that? Already the city keeps ratcheting up its scale. Today’s supertall towers are being overtaken by even bigger ones. Lessons learned at Hudson Yards, if any, will be applied at Sunnyside Yard, which is seven times the size. These thoughts lead to darker questions: Is New York ballooning into oblivion? If you don’t know how to code or what private equity actually is, does that mean your choices are panic, despair, or flight? These musings seem almost reasonable when the new skyline glowers overhead. But then my mind drifts back to the alien separateness of Hudson Yards, and it occurs to me that could be its saving grace. Those who feel pushed away by it will never go there. It will keep hovering 25 feet above the street, a spaceship that hasn’t committed to landing, while the rest of the city scrambles on, peculiar and perpetually discontented, sending its chorus of sirens and grumbles up to the party on the 101st floor.

The High Line was an epiphany when it opened in 2009, a moment suspended between neglect and possibility. The strips of curated wilderness, the medieval-looking iron railings, the disorienting views, the way the viaduct ducked beneath buildings or squeezed through narrow openings to emerge into a broader cityscape—the whole sequence contained the city’s irresistible theatricality. That mirage has taken a decade to dissipate. (Though it is preserved in Google Street View, ca. 2011.)

Today, the High Line serves as an elevated cattle chute for tourists, who shuffle from the Whitney to Hudson Yards, squeezed between high glass walls and luxury guard towers. The views are mostly gone, which is a good thing because stopping to admire one would cause a 16-pedestrian pileup. The rail-level traffic mirrors the congestion overhead, caused by construction so hellbent on milking New York’s waning real estate hyper-boom that any patch of land bigger than a tick’s front yard is considered suitable for luxury condos.

Even before that first day, the seeds of the High Line’s destruction were already scattered among the new plantings. The park came to exist because a small coterie of activists believed they could transform an eyesore into an amenity. An abandoned delivery route for sides of beef, they argued, could become a kind of fast-acting yeast for real-estate prices. But even if you understood that a future of multimillion-dollar penthouses was baked into the park from the beginning, even if you foresaw that a neighborhood where lamb’s blood ran in the streets would attract architectural talent from all over the world, even if you understood that preserving an industrial relic would change the city all around it—even if all that was clear, you still would not have been prepared for today’s scrum of construction. New and still unfinished buildings crowd the length of the High Line like guests at a party where everyone is talking too loud, standing too close, and jockeying for attention, while nobody listens to anyone else.

I started my latest reconnaissance mission at the northern end, and immediately came across two new chips off the crystalline monoliths of Hudson Yards. Avinash K. Malhotra Architects’ 507 West 28th Street rises up 420 feet, or 35 stories of glazed, pristine mediocrity. Right across the High Line is 515 West 29th Street (or “Five-One-Five,” as the marketing folks would have it), a glass fantasia designed by the Singapore-based architect Soo K. Chan. Like most of the condos in this strange rich person’s habitat, it functions as a real-world hookup app for voyeurs and exhibitionists: neighbors and passers-by can gawp back and forth at each other through 10-foot windows, though with only 15 plutocrat-ready apartments in the 11-story building, the chances of anyone’s actually being home to enjoy the fish-tank life are slim. The building, at once showy and generic, gets its lone scrap of distinctiveness from the wavy glass fins affixed to the outside, which give the curtain wall a certain aqueous chic.

What makes those duds look even worse is their proximity to Zaha Hadid’s 520 West 28th Street, the lissome star that reduces all other attention-seekers on the High Line stage to the status of clumsy dilettantes. The L-shaped structure is banded in steel components that swerve, stretch, and glide like a goshawk in flight, all movement and muscle. Despite the design’s beauty and personality, there’s still something comically pretentious about a building that bills itself as live-in art, offering fanciness by association. When I pointed out that even the bathtubs face the High Line, because privacy is prudery these days, a spokesperson for the developer refused to confirm the obvious for a New York fact-checker because it didn’t conform to “the narrative for the building.” I presume the acceptable story line is: They slipped into the tub together, shared a flute of champagne and gazed out at the passing populace, which couldn’t see them at all.

A few other architects do carry off feats of tasteful theatricality, designing buildings that grapple with the past, rather than just plunder it for props. COOKFOX contributed a sinuous, neo-Deco office complex (512 West 22nd Street) that invokes the age when the High Line was built. Clad in ink-black terracotta panels that ripple and shimmer sexily like silk, the building combines noir-ish glamour with the horizontal curves and industrial sinew of 1930s workhorses like the nearby Starrett-Lehigh Building. Morris Adjmi refreshed a 1914 brick warehouse (520 West 20th Street) by mounting a coolly minimal black-steel command center on top. (Bonetti Kozerski tried something similar, to less graceful effect, by mounting a bulbous art viewing space on the roof of the gridded building they designed for Pace Gallery at 540 West 25th Street.) With its iridescent terracotta façade, Roman and Williams’ Fitzroy (514 West 24th Street) is a hand-crafted jazz-age throwback to a time when luxury knew how to swing. (That’ll be $21 million, please.)

For the most part, though, the jostling architecture along the High Line expresses an aesthetic of self-absorbed preening. The area has become a social club for celebrity architects, who compete by pretending that their fellow members simply don’t exist. The first of Thomas Heatherwick’s matched set of condos (515 West 18th Street) is going up, and though it’s still just a concrete shell, you can just make out the bulging bays that will eventually resemble so many glass bubbles bursting through a masonry cage. Bjarke Ingels Group is erecting an even BIGger pair of towers, twisting and leaning towards each other above a whole city block. Every one of these designers invokes the neighborhood’s industrial history—the handsome brickwork and heavy hardware, anyway, though not the smell of offal, the clatter of freight trains, or the brutish labors of dockworkers. But the truth is, most architects who converge on this boulevard of covetous dreams care little about the past.

The context that counts is the park, the marketable glimpses of the Empire State Building or a wedge of water, and the presumptively fabulous existences unfolding among all the hardwood flooring, recessed lighting, and German appliances. Renderings of each new building discreetly edit out the others, as if each development existed in a becalmed post-industrial bubble of its own. A few new buildings seem resentful that a few old ones persist, selfishly hoarding square footage that could be profitably modernized. The bully at 500 West 25th, by the developer and architecture firm GDS, cantilevers menacingly over the shrimpy tenement that houses Marty’s Auto Body, as if willing it to scram.

The rap on luxury development in New York is that it’s geared to absentee owners, who barely stop in for a shower on a layover between continents. But that may change. The Treasury Department has tightened rules for high-end, all-cash real estate purchases, aimed at preventing buyers from hiding their identities behind shell companies. Shady gajillionaires now have to slink off and launder their embezzled fortunes somewhere else, which could land some imperial apartments on the bargain table. (Will someone snap up the 6,853-square-foot penthouse in Hadid’s building, with its 2,552-square-foot terrace, at a beggarly $40 million?)

And yet the odd thing about all the high-rises packed against the High Line is that even fully occupied they contain hardly any people. A full-floor apartment here, a triplex penthouse there and pretty soon you’ve got yourself a good-sized tower with just a half-dozen names on the buzzer. Like SUVs jamming a city street, the airborne congestion is mostly just expensive containers. The good news is that, come the revolution, all these new ultra-deluxe buildings stand ready to get chopped up into cramped one-bedrooms for hoi polloi.

There are more than 1,000 monuments and memorials scattered around New York, with at least five more on the way. The de Blasio administration is starting to address the oversupply of males on pedestals by commissioning five statues of women (one per borough). And the Landmarks Preservation Commission recently approved a tastefully unobtrusive memorial to a brutal inferno, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers, almost all of them women. This city has a lot to remember.

And yet all those statues, plaques, commemorative fountains, and abstract sculptures can never match the awesome ability to forget. Parks and squares are littered with markers that failed at their only job: to keep their topics from falling into oblivion. You may have paused a thousand times at the feet of that mounted king with the two swords crossed above his head in Central Park, but would you be able to pick Jagiello out of a lineup or recite a single fact about his exploits at the Battle of Grunwald? Have regular glimpses of the sugar-white Lorelei Fountain near the Bronx County Courthouse ever nudged you to open a volume by the poet it honors, Heinrich Heine? And how well do you recall the bright June morning in 1904 when 2,500 women and children from the Lower East Side’s German community, Kleindeutschland, boarded an East River excursion boat, the General Slocum? When a fire broke out belowdecks and roared out of control, witnesses on both banks of the river saw what a reporter described as “a spectacle of horror beyond words to express — a great vessel all in flames, sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city, while her helpless, screaming hundreds were roasted alive or swallowed up in waves.” More than 1,000 people were lost in the most lethal disaster to hit New York until September 11, 2001 — their deaths memorialized by an easily overlooked fountain in Tompkins Square Park.

You might think that a more imposing monument would keep a major cataclysm in the public eye. That was part of the justification for cordoning off such a great swath of lower Manhattan as the 9/11 Memorial. Decades from now, anyone who looks down into those two vast unconsoling pools will demand to know what fell into them — or so we can hope. In a future-focused society, amnesia is relentless and all-consuming. Studying history in college is considered passé, a stunningly self-fulfilling attitude.

Monuments are supposed to guard against Lethe, but eventually, even stone starts to crumble, literalizing the brittleness of human memory. In 1882, when the Civil War was still a painful gash in the lives of millions, veterans held a fundraiser in Madison Square Garden to drum up support for a monument to the Union dead. “The exercises consisted of athletic sports, a donkey-race, an exhibition drill … followed in the evening by dancing,” the Times reported. It took another 20 years of relentless lobbying, arm-twisting, shaming, and arguing for the veterans to get the recognition they craved. But when the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a cylindrical temple designed by Stoughton & Stoughton, was finally dedicated on Riverside Drive at 89th Street in 1902, it became an instant landmark, the subject of postcards and photographs, and the pride of real estate developers who saw it as a neighborhood jewel. It soon began falling apart, and the danger of falling masonry means that few have stepped inside for many years. The Times’ David Dunlap did in 2015, and he saw a soaring marble atrium that “culminates in a great dome, ornamented with green mosaic palm fronds and topped by an oculus through which one can see a cupola of polished marble that sparkles like a celestial, faceted jewel.”

Today, the monument is a quasi-ruin behind a chain-link fence. Decades of freezing and thawing have pried marble slabs from their anchors, knocked stairs out of whack, corroded bronze doors, and opened weed-filled cracks. Two years ago, the city commissioned a report on its structural health, and the estimate for a restoration came to $30 million. The Parks Department says only that it is “seeking funding,” though perhaps without much sense of urgency. The nonprofit Riverside Park Conservancy has the monument on a wish list of major repairs, below an equally costly drainage issue that leaves much of the park looking like a crocodile habitat after even a modest rain. It should be an embarrassment that a magnificent memorial to the fighters who kept the nation intact will continue to crumble indefinitely so long as nobody cares enough to come up with the cash to stop the decay. But there are always new needs and urgent priorities. Shame is negotiable. Memory can wait.

How much attention should a memorial claim, anyway? How much steel, stone, square footage, labor, and money are required to ensure that we remember a military victory or a slew of early deaths? A related question: How long is a monument’s term of service? Can we reasonably expect a statue or an obelisk to keep doing its mnemonic job when new tragedies supersede old ones and heroes are revealed to be depraved, or merely human?

A few of these conundrums came before the Landmarks Preservation Commission last month, when it considered adding a Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Memorial to the exterior of the building where the disaster took place. It’s a sign of our contemporary ambivalence toward memorials that the design, by Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo was so self-effacing as to be practically invisible: a thin ribbon of textured metal running vertically along one corner of the building (which is now part of NYU), and a chest-high stainless-steel ledge bearing the victims’ names. The LPC determined that the design would neither obscure any architectural features nor detract from the building’s character, and that it could, if necessary, be undone. And yet the panel also found that even such a light-touch intervention would highlight the “cultural significance” of the former deathtrap. In other words, the planned memorial will attract just enough attention, but not so much that you’d notice.

In theory, we use monuments to preserve the past, correct the present, and instruct the future. New York’s five future statues of women — Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Billie Holiday, civil-rights activist Elizabeth Jennings Graham, public-health advocate Helen Rodríguez Trías, and lighthouse keeper Katherine Walker — figure in today’s ongoing struggles over gender and race, the same struggles that have lately been toppling statues of Confederate leaders. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, the war over how to interpret history is the continuation of politics by other means.

We can’t dictate whether future generations will smash our graven images or, more likely, just ignore them. But every once in a while, some random fragment of the city’s memorial bric-a-brac pops into our daily lives, making the past fleetingly vivid. Several times a week, I walk through the intersection of Broadway at West 106th Street, where a fountain — a bronze nymph reclining on a granite wall — presides over a serene triangular parklet. A carved inscription reads: “In memory of Isidor and Ida Straus, who were lost at sea in the Titanic disaster April 15, 1912. Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives and in their death they were not divided.” Whenever I walk by, I think for a moment about the Strauses — how they must have spent their final moments reaching for each other and gasping for air, but finding only frigid water, and how their awful deaths bequeathed a spot that is so lovely and pleasant in my life.

Perhaps you’re reading this in the back of an Uber (hopefully not in the driver’s seat), while you wait for scores of pedestrians to waddle across the street and get out of the way of your left turn. Or you’re one of those slow-moving pedestrians, glancing up from your screen long enough to register the fleet of mammoth Escalades snorting in impatience while you cross. Or you’re sitting on a bus that keeps its doors open while a passenger maneuvers her walker over the mound of snow that’s been plowed up against the curb. Maybe you’ve saved these words for later because right now you’re busy threading your bike through the mesh of foot and car traffic and dodging a delivery truck parked in the green-painted lane that has theoretically been set aside for your use. All of us — drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, subway riders, cops, and delivery workers — are locked in a matrix of mutual dependency. Many of us pass frequently from one category to another: Anyone who steps out of a car instantly becomes a pedestrian. When one group can’t move easily and safely around the streets, it usually means the rest of us can’t either.

It’s because of this complex, interlocking system that a 104-page transportation plan released by New York’s city council speaker — usually the kind of dry, chart-filled document that generates a frenzy of yawns — is actually exciting. Speaker Corey Johnson has made himself suddenly indispensable by swooping in on one issue that affects virtually everyone: how we move around. Attention has focused on his proposal that the city take control of its own transit system. It’s a rare politician who’s eager to take responsibility for the subway’s failings, but potentially even more transformative is Johnson’s ambition to overhaul the streets. He begins from a deceptively simple principle: New Yorkers should be able to get around without sacrificing their dignity, their sanity, or their health.

Johnson’s report begins from the premise that the status quo is broken; each topic opens with the heading “What’s Not Working.” That’s not an easy sell. Everyone loves to grumble, but most people cling to the status quo anyway, no matter how menacing it is for others. And it is menacing. I walk wherever I can but all it took was a minor injury to make me feel, literally in my bones, how unforgiving this city is of physical frailty. A broken (or nonexistent) subway elevator, a blocked storm drain, an unshoveled sidewalk — each of these contretemps can transform an ordinary errand into a harrowing trek. New York should be a global leader in mobility of every kind; instead, it’s bogged down in good intentions.

We know how to do better. Fixing the subway is a colossal and expensive task, but making the streets more livable requires no advanced technology or multibillion-dollar deals — only paint and asphalt, plus consistent enforcement and political stick-to-itiveness. Protected bike paths and dedicated bus lanes work. Banning cars leads to less pollution and fewer deaths. It’s not mysterious.

What’s innovative about Johnson’s approach is that it places all these basic tools at the service of a “comprehensive transportation vision.” True, that phrase that can read like politico-speak for doing nothing, while promising to do more — eventually. And yes, Johnson has taken some heat for opposing a temporary busway on 14th Street that was designed to alleviate the misery of the now-averted L train shutdown. Transit advocates in this city fight hard for incremental steps, and they hate to see one scrapped without a fight. But you can keep taking baby steps and stay pretty much in the same place forever.

New York is a rusted machine, clotted and creaky, and the only way we can all move through it more smoothly is if we overhaul the whole contraption. “Without concrete, long-term goals for redesigning streets and intersections, it is difficult if not impossible to objectively measure the City’s progress on transforming our streetscapes for improved safety,” Johnson writes. He points to the surgical street designs that the Department of Transportation carries out in crash-prone spots or to help pedestrians with disabilities. These interventions are great, and the report calculates that the DOT is on track to finish all of New York’s 47,000 intersections right around, oh, 2189. (There should be fewer intersections to worry about by then, since many could be underwater.) Sick of waiting, some neighborhoods are coming up with comprehensive visions of their own. The Financial District Neighborhood Association commissioned a proposal meant to “reclaim its streets from cars, garbage, and construction debris” — an ambitious DIY urbanism effort that beleaguered residents of less affluent areas could never afford.

Johnson wants to do it all, urgently: overhaul the subway, fix intersections, stitch the city together with protected bike paths, give buses their own inviolable lanes and priority at street lights, redesign streets, turn over large chunks of the city to pedestrians, halve car ownership, rethink deliveries, and maybe even tear down part of the BQE. If all that seems wildly out of step with reality, consider how quickly and thoroughly New York transformed itself over a century ago to accommodate the horseless wagon. The first crash on city streets took place in 1896. In a little over a decade, the father of traffic laws, William Phelps Eno, had invented the rotary circle, the stop sign, and the one-way street. In the ensuing decades, workers ripped up sidewalks to make way for additional traffic lanes, and belted the boroughs in highways. Starting in 1950, drivers could park their cars on city streets overnight, and sanitation crews cleaned around them. No city in the world could afford to defy the automobile without turning itself into a backwater, and New York was a leader in the automotive revolution.

Now it’s past time to undo that obsolete form of progress, and this time, New York is falling behind. Oslo has banned cars completely from much of its center, and reclaimed hundreds of parking spots. Far from crippling the local economy, as business owners feared, the pedestrianized areas are attracting more foot traffic. Compared to plans in Paris, London, and Madrid, “our efforts to pedestrianize streets … have been piecemeal and timid,” Johnson writes. “Simply put, the City remains mired in a car culture.” He’s in a hurry to haul us out.

Station Square tells a story of a neighborhood

New York’s comeliest blocks are mostly the product of accident or repetition. Some are haphazard accumulations of ornate façades that acquired atmosphere over generations of construction, demolition, and rebuilding. Others are uniform chains of brownstones. Station Square in Forest Hills, on the other hand, is both alluring and anomalous — not a block, exactly, but a planned piazza that isn’t even wholeheartedly urban. After years of scaffolding and orange cones being shunted from facade to street and back again, the square has just reopened to pedestrians, renovated and camera-ready. (And the neighborhood corporation that manages it is apparently considering keeping car traffic permanently away.) But it is more than a pretty place: It represents an important episode in the story of how New York became modern.

In the early years of the 20th century, when Manhattan was growing taller, vaster, and more crowded by the day, Station Square, the centerpiece of the new outlying development of Forest Hills Gardens, provided a caesura at the end of the day for midtown workers, who could hop off the train and take a deep breath of serenity before walking home. The tightly planned neighborhood is neither pastoral nor quite suburban, but an urban antidote to Manhattan’s dense chaos.

Station Square was explicitly designed to charm. From the LIRR station’s elevated platform at Forest Hills, commuters gaze down on a stage set, a fantasy village fitted out in mock-Tudor regalia: gables, greenery, dormer windows, eaves, arcades, wrought-iron lanterns, turrets — even a sort of castle keep. That faceted tower (once the Forest Hills Inn and now an apartment building) sports a sort of Robin Hood cap for a roof, its feather a skinny chimney. You half expect a herald in a velvet doublet to sound a fanfare every time a train pulls in.

English Renaissance knockoffs long ago became a worldwide cliché, a way to spray instant patina onto quickie construction. A bit of fake half-timbering here, an oriel window there, and voilà — quaintness. But when Station Square opened in 1912, it offered far more than nostalgia; it was a thoroughly modern, forward-looking place, wrapped in vintage costume.

Its prettiness was perfect for the camera age. The Kodak Brownie had only recently turned photography into an everyman’s hobby, and a 1914 report in House Beautiful pointed out how well the neighborhood’s textures, details, and mottled shadows showed up in an ordinary snapshot. Forest Hills Gardens, writes the scholar John Stilgoe, was the country’s “first deliberately photogenic residential development.” The staircase to the station, with its curved balcony and symmetrical wings out of an operetta stage set, were made of concrete that appeared to have flowed into place and hardened like lava. In the architect Grosvenor Atterbury’s hands, concrete became expressive. He stirred in shards of tile, stone, and mica, then roughened the surface with an acid wash, all to give it a shimmering, sensuous roughness. Rather than selecting bricks for uniformity, he wanted them mottled and variegated, which gave the square an antique, organic look — the architectural equivalent of pre-torn jeans.

As a result, Station Square looks almost as venerable in early photographs as it does today. The landscaping, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (the Central Park creator’s son), is already on its way to lushness. The clustered buildings of varying bulk seem picturesquely random, though Atterbury conceived them as a single view. Only the rarity of cars and the central fountain, which has since been converted to a planter for a spruce, indicates that the images are a century old. What the camera couldn’t capture then was the square’s russet palette of brick-paved streets, shingled roofs, and pinkish stucco tinted with pulverized tiles. Conceived in color and publicized in black-and-white, Station Square was a pastel daub between the city’s gray mass and the verdant countryside.

Today suburbs get blamed for despoiling the landscape, corroding the atmosphere, and shackling residents to grueling commutes. But Forest Hills is no amorphous exurban mass of wriggling cul-de-sacs. Instead, it fans out from the station along a gracious Greenway that flows toward Forest Park. (Or would, if the connection hadn’t been cut in the 1930s by the construction of Union Turnpike and the Interboro, now Jackie Robinson, Parkway.) That train-to-nature trajectory, the bedrock principle of English planning since the mid 19th century, guided early American suburbs, too. The idea eventually died, killed by fumes from millions of tailpipes, only to return much later, usually in cruder form, as “transit-oriented development.” So Station Square was prescient twice.

The Russell Sage Foundation developed Forest Hills Gardens, even though the project aligned poorly with its mission to improve housing for the urban poor. Instead of fixing up tenements or erecting worker housing, the foundation bought 22 acres of Queens farmland and announced plans to build a model town. It was a novel idea, and the announcement was national news. Manhattan, overrun with chaos and filth, had come to seem irredeemable, at least to orderly-minded urban planners. If they wanted to impose their ideals, they’d have to do it on more or less virgin fields. The city was colonizing the fringes anyway, expanding chaotically into what the monthly Architecture magazine described as a slumscape “of squatter huts, of corrugated iron architecture, and of scavenging goats.”

Not everyone applauded the Sage Foundation’s plans. Even aside from the Elizabethan architectural style, the notion of the garden city seemed suspiciously English — fine, perhaps, for a small green country but not the sort of thing that would thrive amid America’s adolescent cities and rowdy wilds. The all-embracing stylistic consistency that made Station Square so attractive also made it a sign of dictatorial intrusiveness. The Forest Hills Gardens charter restricted what homeowners in the neighborhood could build and how, what businesses could operate, and, effectively, who could live there.

“The foundation had a fairly clear idea of what to exclude,” Stilgoe writes in Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb 1820-1939, “and the excluding required a massive paragraph ranging from brass foundries to crematories, hog pens to cesspools, making ink to producing cream of tartar, dynamite manufactories to sugar bakers, and from tanning to soap preparing.” The rules also effectively excluded buyers who might not fit into the developers’ vision of affable suburban life, with like-minded residents depending on each other’s generosity and good will. “The Gardens is NOT and never will be a promiscuous neighborhood,” the foundation declared, which wasn’t an exhortation to monogamy but a promise that future residents could expect uniformity in architectural style, building quality, and neighbors’ ethnicity. Blacks, Jews, and immigrants, the statement implied, should look elsewhere.

The city has since enfolded Forest Hills Gardens into the metropolitan landscape, and in the realities of a pluralistic society. But Station Square still has the feel of a fictionalized enclave protected by its landscaped embankments and its air of decorous tranquility. Its innovations in concrete, transit, and urban planning have receded into history, leaving a place that has earned its vintage look. One thing that hasn’t changed about the neighborhood is that it boasts a feature common enough in London or Savannah but still a New York rarity: a genuine square.

The movie doesn’t exist and the key piece of urban scenery hasn’t been built yet, but I can see the opening sequence already: James Bond, wearing a tux and riding a motorbike, roars up a car-carrier’s inclined ramp, goes airborne, and lands on the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art that’s slung across Wilshire Boulevard, while the truck speeds through beneath. Agent 007 rips off the helmet: It’s Lupita Nyong’o. Hand-to-hand combat on the desert-flat roof ensues. In the galleries below, Roman statues by the glass walls preen against the setting sun.

Every once in a while, a work of architecture triggers a shift in the way a city thinks of itself. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Hall did that for Los Angeles when it opened in 2003. Two decades later (give or take a couple of years), I suspect Peter Zumthor’s LACMA will do it again. As the existing galleries slowly go dark and their contents are packed away in preparation for demolition, a new $650 million replacement is in the works. Squeezed on all sides by a park, open tar pits, a film museum, and an eight-lane city street, LACMA will twist and vault across one of the city’s major arteries, as if to catch the attention of drivers as they pass underneath. With that move, it pays homage to the history of Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile, which was developed in the 1920s as a shopping street for the automobile age, lined with buildings and signs that beckoned passersby to pull over, park, and go inside. LACMA is staking its claim to the cityscape with a design that’s simultaneously understated and bold, provocative and deeply serious.

For all those reasons and many more, the plan faces artillery barrages of skepticism and hostility, starting with the question: Why can’t LACMA stay just the way it is, a collection of buildings erected over 40 years? My preference is almost always to grant an existing structure the right to continue existing, but in this case I understand the need to start by tearing much of the original museum down. When the first trio of buildings by William Pereira, executed in a style you might call Lincoln Center lite, went up in 1965, they framed an elevated plaza and appeared to float on a series of reflecting pools. Then black goo from the La Brea Tar Pits started seeping into the water, and the fountains shut down. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer reworked the complex in the 1980s and left it disjointed, cut off from the street, and still in need of fantastically expensive seismic retrofitting.

In 2001, with the dust still settling from the last spasms of construction, the museum settled on a plan to tear the whole lot down and replace it with a new campus designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, spread out beneath a vast tent-like roof. The money didn’t materialize and the plan was shelved. (Not that LACMA saved much: The cost of fixing up the existing buildings now starts at nearly $250 million, not including earthquake-proofing or a system for neutralizing the methane that spews from underground.)

Instead, the museum started expanding in stages. Michael Govan took over as director in 2006, and since then LACMA has erected two new buildings by Renzo Piano, the Resnick Pavilion and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (not to be confused with The Broad, also a contemporary art museum, three miles away on Bunker Hill). Those will remain, along with Bruce Goff’s marvelously quirky Japanese Pavilion, built in 1988, and now temporarily closed for renovation. Having added nearly 100,000 square feet of space in 15 years, Govan wants to consolidate the rest into a single structure, spread out on a single floor.

He turned to Peter Zumthor, a Swiss architect who has the reputation of a mystic and a portfolio of quiet, often isolated buildings. His Brother Klaus Field Chapel, set among cultivated lands in western Germany, halfway between Aachen and Bonn, is a work of distilled, intensely austere poetry. The architect marshaled local farmers into erecting a tall bivouac out of tree trunks, then poured concrete around it, and burned the wood away, venting the smoke through a hole in the roof. The result is a small concrete stele standing mysteriously against the horizon. A triangular steel door opens onto an interior with charred and textured walls, dramatically illuminated by a shaft of light from above. The idea of letting such an architectural shaman loose on Los Angeles is both exciting and worrisome. At the Field Chapel he didn’t even have to install plumbing, let alone manage crowd flow, cross a highway, or meet seismic code.

Zumthor’s LACMA design has evolved at a glacial pace. In 2013, after years of work, he unveiled a black, amoeba-like shape that seemed to have oozed out of the tar next door and petrified in midair. When the Natural History Museum, which runs the La Brea Tar Pits, objected that the structure would edge too close to the paleontological zone, Zumthor stretched the structure in a different direction, drawing it across Wilshire Boulevard and sticking it to a lot at the corner with Spaulding Avenue. Little turrets popped out of the ceiling to let light stream into the gallery through clerestory windows. Two revisions later, the skylights and the dark color are gone, and what remains is a glass sandwich between wheat-colored slabs, levitating over one of L.A.’s major traffic arteries. (Okay, not levitating, exactly: It will rest on seven thick columns, which anchor a restaurant, a bookshop, an education facility, a theater, and a children’s space.)

Some critics have always been unconvinced by the road-jumping. “Does the design fetishize car culture?” asked Christopher Hawthorne, then the L.A. Times’ architecture critic (now the city’s chief design officer). “At the very least it celebrates it, in that genuine, often earnest way that Europeans have long viewed our vast grid of boulevards and freeways.” It’s true that the amoeba’s glass outline turns traffic into a mesmerizing spectacle, but that show will change as the city does. This section of Wilshire will soon get a subway stop; if it also grows protected bus and bicycle lanes and a more pedestrian-loving streetscape, then LACMA visitors will have a skybox view of that metamorphosis. The Wilshire-straddling move asserts that art can have a powerful role in reshaping L.A. for the 21st century, just as the automobile did in the 20th.

As Zumthor has refined the design, its plan has started to look more and more like a shape — at once liquid, rigorous, and animate—dreamed up by Jean Arp. Of course, we will only ever see that form from the air, or experience it from underneath. Over time, the design has gradually become less fanciful, less reliant on curving glass walls, less enamored of its early clunky chic. The latest renderings look less bespoke, with large panes of glass held in brass frames, terrazzo floors, ceiling-mounted brass spotlights, and irregularly shaped stone pavers that sweep from the outdoors in. The final product will balance between Zumthor’s refined brand of hand-tooled brutalism and the building’s vast scale, between the poetry of the institution’s budget and the temptations of off-the-shelf shopping-mall details.

Like another Pritzker Prize winner, Tadao Ando, Zumthor is a believer in the expressive powers of concrete, but American craftsmanship in that treacherous material is rarely as finicky as the kind that Northern European and Japanese architects can count on back home. In this country, cracks and inconsistencies get passed off as intentional roughness. Not always, though: LACMA should demand the same level of workmanship that Ando obtained for his sublime Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

LACMA doesn’t win points for its rollout of the new design. A small gallery in the soon-to-be-demolished Ahmanson Building contains a historical timeline going back to the 1960s, a crude site model that shows the footprint as a balsa-wood splotch, and a rotating batch of renderings. No plans, no drawings, no augmented-reality fly-through — nothing to soothe critics primed to compare it to a motel, a coffee table, or an Italian highway rest stop. I, too, joined the scoffer’s chorus when the latest designs emerged in March, but the longer I’ve spent studying these paltry materials and pacing the site, the more promise I feel the project has.

Criticisms have been legion: It’s too bland, too blond, too small, too horizontal, too costly. New York’s former architecture critic, Joseph Giovannini, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, has kept a steady drumbeat of scorn going for years. To the Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, the design embodies director Michael Govan’s attack on the encyclopedic museum, in which the world’s art is divided into regions and disciplines and masterworks stay in their place where repeat visitors know where to find them.

Govan has a nimbler institution in mind. He has proposed three connected reasons to place the entire collection on a single, continuous floor, and I’ll buy one and a half. The first is practical: It makes life easier for visitors with wheelchairs or strollers, avoids the crush at elevators, and doesn’t eat up gallery space for escalators. Fair enough, but Govan goes on to invoke the same dubiously applicable wisdom that has filled the nation with horizontal shopping malls: Nobody wants to go upstairs. Piano tried to tackle the problem with the dramatic outdoor escalator that wafts visitors straight to the top of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, so they can trickle back down. The strategy only sort of works: Govan says he regularly meets Angelenos who express surprise that the building even has an upstairs. That translates into sparsely populated galleries that cost just as much to keep open as if they were always thronged. All this may be truer in L.A. than it is in Manhattan, where MoMA exhibits its mainstays on the fifth floor and temporary blockbusters on the sixth floor, and still manages to attract 3 million visitors a year (twice as many as LACMA).

Govan’s second rationale is ideological: Museums with multiple stories inevitably fall back on hoary Western hierarchies, placing European masterworks in sweet spots, and relegating other traditions to attics and distant wings. The new LACMA will be, literally, a leveler. This argument seems specious. A staircase isn’t deterministic, and an elevator’s numbered buttons don’t translate to ratings for different artistic cultures. What affects the perception of an artwork’s importance lies in the way it’s hung, lit, and labeled, and what company it keeps — not in its height off the street.

The third and most persuasive reason for a horizontal museum is experiential: It allows curators to map a network of routes through the collection that offer both guidance and surprise. The surprise part is already at work in Piano’s one-story Resnick Pavilion, where I wandered in, past Zhu Jinshi’s colossal curling wave shaped out of crumpled xuan paper, through an exhilarating display of Central Asian textiles and a revelatory show of art from Sri Lanka, and finally into a generous Charles White retrospective. I didn’t even know how little I knew about most of these topics, and the discovery and juxtaposition were thrilling.

Govan envisions laying out the permanent collection like a canny tour guide, mixing familiarity and adventure. There’s some paradox in this approach. To avoid a linear, European-dominated narrative of art history, LACMA hired a European architect to produce a long, linear building. To get maximum flexibility, the new museum will dispense with temporary Sheetrock partitions and lock itself in with immovable concrete walls. Zumthor can resolve these contradictions by creating a layout where the current director can implement his vision and the next might possibly undo it.

Even after all these years of tinkering, LACMA has yet to release a floor plan or a detailed explanation of how the art and architecture will interact. Still, it’s clear that Zumthor has developed three kinds of galleries, shaped not by historical rubrics but by their relationship to light. Stone sculptures can withstand even SoCal sunshine; sketches on paper need a crepuscular dimness; paintings can manage with a calibrated mix of natural and artificial illumination. Light is Zumthor’s trade, the reason he got the LACMA job in the first place. At the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, erected on and around the ruins of a bombed church, daylight glimmers through holes in the façade, sneaks around corners, slips down a staircase, and bleeds into pools of electric incandescence. I haven’t been to the spa Zumthor designed in the Swiss village of Vals, but photographs suggest that there, he has given substance to shadow.

The future LACMA will succeed or fail on how well he handles L.A.’s hot glare and bleached skies, so different from the moody grays of Northern Europe. Zumthor’s narrow, snaking building has glass on all sides and wears a wide-brimmed canopy like a flattened Stetson. Late in the day, a strip of brilliance backlights the Roman statues standing near the ribboning window. Otherwise, a matte pallor, lightened by the sand-colored stone façade, spreads through the outer galleries. Deeper inside, smaller, darker rooms cluster around a series of indoor courtyards so that the experience will be bellows-like: Walk in toward the core, out toward the edge, from dark to light and back.

New York has finally decided that tossing troubled people into an antiquated dungeon, ensuring that they come out even more deeply wounded than when they went in, brings shame to a nominally civilized city. The isolated warren of cells, pens, yards, and trailers on Rikers Island — “a penal colony in the middle of the East River,” as council speaker Corey Johnson puts it — has been sentenced to close, part of a planned overhaul of the criminal-justice system that aims to halve the jail population by 2026. All of this seems hopeful, hugely expensive, and possibly quixotic.

The city is betting big on architecture. At the heart of the transformation is a plan to distribute detainees among four new high-rises, close to the courthouses of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. It will take an estimated seven years and nearly $9 billion to rehouse the equivalent of a small college’s student body into secure vertical dorms. That’s more than it will cost to rebuild LaGuardia airport, which serves 30 million passengers a year. These are optimistic uses of the future tense: Before the last ribbon is cut, those estimates will almost certainly come to seem quaint, shredded by delays, lawsuits, overruns, abuses, and waste. Meanwhile, nobody will want to spend serious money to rehab a doomed facility, and as the years go by, Rikers will decay ever more drastically, doing ever more damage along the way.

Around the country, law-and-order conservatives have insisted that the most effective way to clamp down on crime, fight drugs, and cope with extreme mental illness was to build more jails. Here, progressive politicians counter that the best way to reintegrate detainees into society, reduce the preposterous costs of keeping them locked up, dismantle the prison-industrial complex, and reap the dividend that comes with lower crime rates is to … build more jails. At the far end of the debate are No New Jails activists, who see incarceration as a perpetual instrument of racist oppression: You can’t design a more civilized detention facility, they say, any more than you can bludgeon someone gently.

Maybe a new generation of hyperexpensive confinement is truly the best or, at any rate, the unavoidable option. It’s certainly good to see politicians plan for a future that will arrive well after they’ve left office. But we should be skeptical about architecture’s ability to solve social problems on its own. So far, the de Blasio administration’s two-year-old strategy to reduce homelessness by building an archipelago of shelters has had no perceptible impact.

Or consider the precedent of public housing. In the second half of the 20th century, the powerful and well-intentioned decreed that the poor were living in irredeemable squalor; the only way to rescue them en masse was to tear down their neighborhoods and move them to modern, sanitary structures. For a while, it worked, especially in New York, where housing projects were generally sturdy, airy, and safe. It did not take long, though, for stinginess and prejudice to take hold. Light bulbs went unreplaced, elevators unrepaired, residents unheard. Drug dealers commandeered playgrounds and darkened stairwells, police stayed out, and parents kept their children away from open windows where they could be hit by stray bullets. The new solution for desperate poverty was to undo the previous solution: Authorities memorably dynamited the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1972, and more recently demolished the Cabrini–Green project in Chicago. The same logic held in London, when the council housing estate Robin Hood Gardens has come down over the last two years. These were failures of funding, politics, and social glue, but architecture was sold as the cure and so it got the blame.

For as long as there have been prisons full of abjection and despair, there have been plans to replace them with showcases of decency. London’s ancient house of horrors, Newgate Prison (a quick stroll from the courthouse, as New York’s new detention centers will be), had a demonic reputation, and it was demolished and rebuilt many times, only to revert to its old miseries. When one of those ever-more-modern iterations opened, it was soon overwhelmed by untreated mental illness. In his book London: The Biography, the historian Peter Ackroyd quotes an early-19th-century report on conditions at Newgate: “Lunatics ranged up and down the hallways, a terror to all they encountered.” The prison was definitively demolished at the turn of the 20th century.

Rikers Island, too, began as an enlightened showcase. In 1886, when conditions (and porous security arrangements) in city jails like the Tombs horrified reformers, the city was already contemplating “an enormous model penitentiary, ample in size to serve for many years to come, and which … should be the most perfect prison in the world.” It took nearly 50 years before the offshore, purportedly escape-proof complex opened with a planned capacity of 2,200. Within seven years, the commissioner of corrections complained that he had no choice but to cram in 3,000 residents, using machine rooms for the overflow.

Crowding is a recurring theme in the history of correctional design. In New York, the jail population has fallen from a peak of 22,000 in 1991 to 7,000 today, and the goal is to get it to 3,300, the lowest number since 1920. Depending on whom you ask, that’s either too many or too few. Projecting that steep a drop assumes that the era of falling crime and compassionate corrections will stretch into the distant future. The city hopes to nudge the trend along by spending $391 million to transform the criminal-justice system from a bureaucracy of punishment into a social service agency, providing mental-health treatment, “violence interruption,” and various other programs meant to keep people out of jail. Not so fast, respond hardened pessimists: Crime can roar back at any moment, and when it does, we’re going to need somewhere to stash a surging population of criminals. Predictions follow politics, but crime may have a dynamic of its own.

Then there’s the question of what the city will be getting for its $9 billion. A well-ordered jail is not just a storage shed for human beings; it’s a place where defendants who have yet to face trial can prepare for their defense, keep busy, stay safe, and get ready for the outside world. Rikers keeps them focused on merely staying alive. There, moving prisoners around is a cumbersome proposition. Hallways can be treacherous, gates unwieldy. Every day, corrections officers load groups from Rikers onto buses and transport them to an assortment of courthouses and back. Lawyers have to set aside half a day to visit each client. Family members often can’t get there at all.

New jails can ease those transitions. James Krueger, a principal at the California-based architecture firm HMC, which designed the widely praised Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility in San Diego, says that architecture can help flip the ratio of carrots to sticks. His firm designed six different levels of security within the same compound, with a goal of granting inmates as much autonomy as they can handle. “We want to incentivize good behavior through degrees of freedom,” Krueger says. “You can start out in level three and work your way down to level one, where you can walk to your classes and from one building to another without being escorted. You’re living on campus, but you need to be able to go for a walk and have a conversation with a friend or a counselor.”

Architects frequently beat the drum for the power of design to engineer society and improve lives. Those are not empty claims, but they should be tempered by modesty. One recent trend in hospitals and schools is evidence-based design, which translates data into some pretty common-sense techniques. Just the presence of a window improves patients’ health and students’ ability to learn. Old-style concrete-and-steel boxes amplify noise, pummeling detainees with constant, panic-inducing reverberations. New facilities can create a softer acoustic environment, giving bruised minds a chance to heal — and making it easier for officers to figure out where an anomalous noise is coming from.

Las Colinas, like most of the daylight-filled Scandinavian-style models that reform advocates promote, spreads out horizontally like a suburban high school. New York’s new jails will be towers surrounded by other towers, which makes getting detainees daylight and fresh air, for instance, a uniquely urban logistical puzzle. It also means building in costly redundancies, superwide stairwells, powerful ventilation systems, extra elevators, and outdoor spaces on almost every floor, which helps to explain the price tag.

“We use a ‘podular’ approach,” says Jeff Goodale, an architect who directs the Justice Group at the large firm HOK and who designed the startlingly airy Maple Street Correctional Facility in San Mateo, California. “You have 24 to 64 inmates in a unit and all the services they need — outdoor recreation, food, counseling, medication — are provided right there. That way, you’re not moving inmates throughout the facility.”

The far deeper challenge lies in alleviating a culture of brutality that can defeat any design. Architecture can express empathy; it can’t manufacture it. Goodale is bullish on design’s ability to improve behavior. “A third of the people who are in a facility every day are staff, and they may spend many years working there,” he points out. “If the space they’re in makes them feel less stressed, less burdened, and less overwhelmed, that has a positive impact on how they manage the inmates.” I hope he’s right, but I doubt that any building can force guards to treat their charges with respect if they’re inclined to see them as objects, or dissuade detainees from taking their frustrations out on each other. Eventually, any structure can fail under the weight of hostility and neglect, no matter how much it costs.

If you were going to anoint a single great temple to the deity of fossil fuel, you might choose the Battersea Power Station, just across the Thames from some of the costliest real estate in London. From the 1930s through the ’70s, it sucked up coal and pumped out electricity. Now it’s burning through £9 billion ($11.5 billion) in the hope of generating much, much more, and that process of transformation is an awesome, troubling thing to behold. Bristling with cranes, it hulks over the river like some rough beast, slouching toward Westminster. Londoners know it from a distance — the quartet of chimneys jabbing at clouds, its mountainous brick bulk — but few have been inside. That will soon change, along with everything else about it.

I recently toured the construction site with Sebastien Ricard, an architect at the firm Wilkinson Eyre who is in charge of disemboweling, shoring up, and rebuilding the structure for use as a zone of white-collar lifestyle and work. Even when I stand inside the shell, the great fluted columns of the turbine hall rising toward a distant ceiling, the scale of the place is hard to fathom. One of the two boiler houses is filled with an impenetrable thicket of scaffolding. In the other, fresh armatures of concrete and steel have grown up beneath a new roof. Not long ago, Battersea Power Station was a ruin, left exposed by a developer who went bankrupt before he made good on a plan for an open-air amusement park. For years, only the rain and the odd nocturnal creature penetrated the decaying interiors.

Now, money is flowing again, thanks to a consortium of the Malaysian development group Setia, Sime Darby Property, and Employees Provident Fund. Ricard points out a vast slab of raw concrete that one day will host cocktail parties, with expansive views onto the Thames. Beyond, an undergrowth of apartment blocks is already growing around the outer walls, supplemented by an esplanade, a riverboat stop, and a couple of still-quiet cafés. Leisure is on the move.

There’s something simultaneously exciting, a little sad, and bracingly preposterous about the rehabilitation: exciting because the project brings fresh life to a central city tract that has been forlorn for a couple of generations; sad because that life consists of a narrow and familiar set of ways to make and spend money. Preposterous because the task of converting a huge machine for the postindustrial era means treating it as a precious relic. To satisfy Historic England, the body that oversees “listed” buildings, the developers had to demolish and rebuild four of those graceful but useless smokestacks, match thousands of damaged tiles, and order a million hand-made bricks from the same workshops that furnished the originals. It’s a multibillion-dollar fixer-upper.

The largest brick building in Europe, it inspired awe in the kingdom of energy. The architect was Giles Gilbert Scott, who brought a classicizing finesse to tough utilitarian structures like the Bankside Power Station that later became Tate Modern, and the U.K.’s famous red telephone booth. (The booth has an exquisite architectural pedigree: It’s based on the 19th-century architect Sir John Soane’s mausoleum, which in turn got its characteristic shallow dome from the breakfast room in Soane’s own house.) As if to guard against inevitable obsolescence, Scott encrusted the Battersea colossus with Art Deco flourishes, including the opulent control room with coffered ceilings. (In the next incarnation, that will become an event space.)

The power station burned a million tons of coal a year, hewn from the ground under Northumberland and Wales, hauled by train or loaded on barges, and transferred from a jetty on the Thames. When the facility was first proposed, Londoners objected to the idea of spitting so much coal smoke into the air of their city center. Not to worry, the journal Nature chirped in 1932: Recent technological advances had “proved conclusively that the emission of sulphur fumes can be reduced to a negligible quantity.” That was partly true: An innovative process scrubbed the gases of their most noxious ingredients by “washing” them with water — which was then dumped into the Thames. Keeping the lights on amounted to a choice between visibly poisoning the air and invisibly poisoning the river. Eventually, though, coal did both. In 1952, a thick cloud laden with toxins settled over London, and by the time it dissipated five days later, it had killed 12,000 people. Battersea’s B section was still under construction.

It was the album cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals that gave the almost-retired plant a global profile and a reputation for mayhem that continued through rock concerts, festivals, and raves. (Algie, the inflatable pink pig tethered to one of the chimneys for the photo shoot, broke free and soared into the Heathrow Airport flight path; police helicopters chased it for miles until it alighted in a field in Kent.) The powerhouse glowered over the banks of the Thames, but it loomed even more impressively in the lives of commuters, who passed its great brick cliffs on the train just before pulling into Victoria Station. “It looked like a gate, or a castle,” says the aptly named Peter Watts in his book Up in Smoke: the Failed Dreams of Battersea Power Station. “When it came into view, that was the moment you were entering the city, which was always so much more exciting than whatever town in Surrey you were coming from. It looked primal and permanent. I fantasize that at the end of days, everything else will be gone and the power station will remain.”

And yet the apparently eternal hulk was supremely fragile. In 2004, it cropped up on the World Monuments Fund’s endangered list. Dozens of schemes, each more grandly harebrained than the last, were rolled out, threatening various combinations of rescue and destruction. The New York–based architect Rafael Viñoly contributed several idas: A decade ago, a group of Irish developers hired him to design a new ostensibly “clean” power plant tucked below ground and topped with a new 1,000-foot chimney, next to an office park that would have been covered by a plastic “eco-dome.” That dream went the way of so many others in the 2008 financial crisis. Later, the Chelsea Football Club recruited Viñoly to design a soccer stadium there, though what he really wanted was a concert hall. The architect Terry Farrell suggested stripping the carcass down to four chimneys and two walls and enshrining it in parkland as an immense, evocative ruin. That proposal addressed the central conundrum of its redevelopment. Preserving the structure’s mysterious isolation, its sheer brooding strangeness, meant leaving the land around it vacant or, at most, scattering it with low-rise buildings the way a medieval village huddles around its cathedral. But builders don’t make money by not building, and the quantities of cash needed to preserve the thing, never mind reinvigorate the area, were inconceivably enormous. By 2014, the station was back on the WMF’s watch list again.

When Setia and its partners landed the site, Viñoly returned, this time with a plan that wrapped the brick monolith in glass apartment complexes (one designed by Frank Gehry, another by Norman Foster), close-cropped lawns, and fountains with the usual dancing jets of water. A year and a half from now, a new Northern Line Underground stop will stitch a long-inaccessible area back into Central London.

The power station itself will contain an immense indoor shopping center and rentable party spaces, topped by crow’s-nest penthouses. Apple has scooped up most of the offices that will crown the structure. Wilkinson Eyre’s design reclaims the site’s history and smooths it over at the same time, inserting an elegantly generic lattice of black steel, glass walls, and airy voids. Where once generators roared, now milk will be foamed, code written, and brand identities polished.

One detail captures the ethos of spectacular silliness that pervades almost every huge development project these days: a sightseeing elevator that glides up through one of the pristine chimneys and pops out the top, giving passengers a quick 360-degree vista, before dropping back inside. Let’s hope that a metamorphosis on this imperial scale yields something more solid and meaningful than a soap bubble with a view. Still, if this all seems more like a default option than a thrilling destiny, consider the imaginative alternatives that failed because of the site’s sheer scale and the possible squandered fortunes. The current future isn’t ideal, but it’s probably the least bad solution — far better than just letting the whole thing collapse into a disconsolate pile of rubble.

When Central Park Tower at 217 West 57th Street officially tops out at 1,550 feet on September 17, it will (if you don’t count the 400-foot spire atop One World Trade Center) become New York’s tallest building. It has already transformed the skyline, paired with the 1,428-foot residential needle on the next block at 111 West 57th. I recently toured the construction site with the building’s two Chicago architects, Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill. Smith designed the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, as well as the future tallest, the kilometer-high (3,280-foot) Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia. Moving from sidewalk to a gajillionaire’s aerie — a 15,898-square-foot three-floor penthouse — we talked about how a 131-story tower can possibly fit into our city.

Gordon Gill: How well do you know the building?

Justin Davidson: I can see it from all over the city, including from my living room. At first, I thought it was just the construction hoist that was blocking my view of the Empire State Building, but I guess not.

G.G.: One of the perils of living in an urban context.

J.D.: From the street, this looks like several buildings in one: a seven-floor Nordstrom at the base, a wing to the west, a cantilevered section to the east, and the tower. How do they all hang together?

G.G.: The site goes from 57th through to 58th Street and all the way to Broadway. When you’re designing a super-tall building, most of the time you’ll plant the concrete core in the dead center of the site. If we had done that, we’d have wound up with piecemeal retail. So the first move was to slip the core to the side. When you do that, the tower follows.

J.D.: So that’s how you get the section that sticks out above the Art Students League?

G.G.: Right. A lot of people questioned whether we had respect for that building [an 1892 landmark]. But a lot of detail and study went into that. They have a beautiful skylight in north-facing studios for the natural light, and we didn’t want to compromise that.

J.D.: They were worried about glare.

Adrian Smith: Yes, but the exterior wall above the Art Students League roof is solid, with no glass, just a soft zinc surface, so you get a very subdued reflection.

J.D.: How do you design such a huge building to slot into such a dense area?

G.G.: Everyone wants a view of Central Park, but we had a big building right in front of us [220 Central Park South]. It’s like being at the theater; if everyone’s in rows trying to see the stage, nobody can see anything at all. The solution is to stagger the seats. When we moved the tower off-center to get better retail spaces, we discovered an opportunity to capture incredible direct and oblique views. That’s why the building is stepped and staggered in every direction — north, south, east, and west — walking all the way up to 1,550 feet. If you look at this building from a distance, it has a strong ethos and a sense of stability. On the other hand, there’s a lot of movement. The trick was managing all that activity without getting overly effusive.

J.D.: It’s true — this isn’t one of those seamless glass prisms. Do all those notches and fins have any other purpose?

A.S.: It’s all about wind. The wind behavior in Manhattan is unique.

J.D.: Because it’s bouncing around all these other buildings?

A.S.: And because you get hurricane-force winds.

J.D.: So how do you figure that out?

G.G.: We come up with the basic form, then drop it into a scale model of midtown and perform wind-tunnel analysis on it. We tweak the shape, we cut it, we shift it, we slide it. We have a pretty good intuition about what’s going to happen, but we’re always learning more about keeping everybody comfortable and happy inside.

J.D.: Can you get a little more specific?

G.G.: As the wind goes around the building, it accelerates, and it creates vortices that alternate, causing the building to move from side to side. Sometimes we can use that phenomenon, cutting openings for the wind and converting it to energy with turbines. Here, we’re not trying to bring the wind through the building; we’re managing it, shaping the notches to optimize wind flow. A building is like an instrument: You use science to make a kind of art.

J.D.: So is a super-tall skyscraper fundamentally different from a plain old high-rise, or is it just a bigger version of the same thing?

G.G.: People say things like “Oh, a 120-story building is just two 60-story buildings stacked.” That’s not true. The wind speeds are different, the performance is different — everything changes. If you make a mistake on one of these buildings, you have to multiply it by a thousand.

J.D.: If you get it wrong, can you adjust?

A.S.: When Taipei 101, which was the world’s tallest at the time, was under construction, they had reached three stories or so when they finally got the wind-tunnel test done. And the test said this building is going to move like crazy — you have to change it. They had to cut a sawtooth on every corner, put in a 660-ton damper, and roughen up the walls here and there. Otherwise, it would have failed. I mean, it wouldn’t have collapsed, but it would have been very uncomfortable.

J.D.: Aside from the way it accommodates our overcomplicated wind patterns, what else makes this a distinctively New York building?

G.G.: The standards in New York are very high and so are the expectations. That leads to delicate detail and a lot of attention paid to where the columns are, the size of the glass, the proportions of the rooms, the acoustic isolation. It’s not a loose design.

A.S.: Look at the stainless-steel fins on the exterior. Eventually, when the protective coating comes off, you’ll see gradations of light on them, the way they sparkle and are offset from the wall so the façade has a sense of depth and richness.

J.D.: They look like shiny pinstripes.

A.S.: When we do the tallest building in China or Dubai or Saudi Arabia, they’re exuberant about that. New York is a much more sensitive environment, so we have to try to do the right thing for the site, design as beautiful a building as we can, be very respectful of the neighborhood, and try to improve on what’s there.

J.D.: Right. Some of your towers effectively create a new skyline from scratch. Here, you’re making a statement in a historic skyline. That’s a heavy responsibility.

G.G.: A building has to speak to you from the street, from the middle, and from the skyline. So that conversation on the skyline is between us, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and all the other iconic symbols of the city. We hope that this building will participate in that dialogue, not just because of its height but because of its character.

A.S.: The lighting is part of that: It’s subtle, not garish. The tall vertical slots at the top will be lit up nicely with white light, and it’s a big enough mass to be seen among the cacophony of windows.

J.D.: How about during the day?

A.S.: Because of the kind of glass we’re using, it won’t be this big blob but will blend with the sky and reflect it. The building will have this disappearing quality.

J.D.: It’ll just vanish, huh? [Skeptical raising of eyebrows.] We’ve seen a spate of these very thin residential buildings, especially along 57th Street. The global hyperluxury real-estate market made them financially feasible, but what recent technological advances make them possible?

G.G.: The materials, for one thing. On Burj Khalifa, they ran concrete through tubes in the desert, and it looks like water but it hardens to an incredible strength. More important, though, is the kind of deep analysis of performance characteristics, the relationship between structure and architecture. We don’t want to create a form, then shove a structure into it and try to make it work. We fuse them from the beginning.

A.S.: Every time you do the tallest building in the world, it’s completely new. You study and test, and you find new issues. When I was doing Jin Mao [in Shanghai in 1999], I remember saying, “We’re going to add 10 percent to the body of knowledge about super-tall buildings.” Well, there are 100 buildings this tall now, either in the planning stages or built. Each time you do that, you learn something more.

J.D.: So if the zoning and the neighbors allowed it, could you have gone even taller right here?

A.S.: Oh yeah. Jeddah Tower is twice the height of this one. You could drop that in here, for sure.