If They Can Build It Here

The challenge for all these architects is the tyranny of Manhattan's street grid. The tight, 19th- century urban fabric has hampered architectural visionaries in the past and encouraged the conservative design that's flourished in recent decades. Only a few architects have broken out of it: Wright with the Guggenheim (which Upper East Side preservationists might succeed in shouting down if he tried to build it today) or Mies's Seagram Building, as revolutionary for its graceful setback from Park Avenue as for the building itself.

Today's innovators are finding new ways to tweak their relentlessly rectilinear sites. Look at the New Museum, where SANAA partners Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa toyed with the conventional form, breaking it to look like an irregular stack of boxes—which became an ingenious way to allow daylight to stream into the interior. Or see Tschumi's Blue building—its oddball shape actually came about by maximizing what the zoning envelope would permit. And when a building goes off the grid, as Gehry's IAC does along the city's western edge, you can see his design in a whole new way. Try zooming up the West Side Highway in a cab; as you whoosh pass the IAC, its undulating pleats of glass look like they were made for speed.

Not everyone in New York's design world is euphoric. Economic and market restraints clearly limit what architects can do. "To my mind, there is not yet a single example of a great architect doing their very best work in New York," says Columbia's Wigley, "though there are very good things going on." And there's a real fear about the potential impact of an economic downturn. "We've been very insulated from what is happening in the rest of the country," says Peter Slatin, editor of a commercial real-estate letter, theslatinreport .com, "but I think it's going to catch up with us in the next six to nine months." Yet even if some stunning new projects on the boards get shelved, high expectations for design are once again part of the city's culture. These days, that's crucial to New York's place among the great global cities of the 21st century.

© 2007