New York

This book documents its most significant works of architecture both built and projected, from the past 10 years and 10 years into the future. It is less a record of the imagination of architects and more a document that views architecture as the most permanent residue of the profound culture of a city. Unseen but always present with the multiple activities that are concentrated within the fabric of a great city are deeply rooted structures that sustain the essential ideological nature of its organisation. And beneath all the glitz and grime it must not be forgotten that New York remains the most ideological of cities created by the Enlightenment - created to form a ruthless rational order whose reality would forever be in a state of becoming.

The essays offer the material evidence of the state of the city at the start of the new millennium. They present a continual concern with the erosion of that order with which the city was reformed at the start of the 19th century: an erosion that affects not only the shape of communities and neighbourhoods but also their political and social order. The gridding of Manhattan, that regulated playing field that allowed the city to become a dominant mercantile power, became softened by the sense and sensibility of late 19thcentury civics - a cultural paternalism which enabled the wealthy to build institutions with a permanence surpassing those of Europe. By the century's end New York had both produced and attracted vast extremes of wealth and poverty, all held within the constant egalitarian order of the grid.

Into the first decades of the 20th century population soared as waves of immigrants fled the disassembling of Europe. The city rapidly spread across north, south and east, building communities that were formed increasingly by private speculation and cultural difference. The 20th century brought a brutal machine order, carried in the hundreds of miles of highways driven through the city under the direction of Robert Moses and careless of social and political consequences.

Though all past orders persist into the present and continue to have influence, a continual absorption of the world's migrants and the unresolved divisions of class and race have created a city of deeply divided ethnic and cultural enclaves. These enclaves are united to the idea of New York by only one common bond: the shared participation in the goods and services of commerce and industry.

Contents

• Foreword
• Orders
• Icons
• Boroughs
• Streets
• Architecture
• Buildings
• Perspectives
• Projects
• Futures
• Dreams
• Bibliography