Architecture

The planned supertall at 37-47 West 57th Street shows how New York's Zoning for Accessibility turns private development ambition into public transit upgrades.

Santiago Calatrava's Oculus is a transit hub, a shopping concourse, and a memorial machine aligned to light on September 11.

SoHo's cast-iron buildings are low by New York standards, but their prefabricated facades helped prove ideas that later made glass skyscrapers possible.

The E.V. Haughwout Building looks like a cast-iron SoHo landmark, but its real importance is the passenger elevator that changed the economics of height.

The United Nations Secretariat looks like a simple glass slab, but its cooling system depends on the East River and on a legal status unlike almost any other site in New York.

55 Hudson Yards looks like a clean office tower, but its base wraps around subway ventilation and station infrastructure built before the tower rose.

Outside the Oyster Bar, Grand Central hides a small acoustic trick where curved tile vaults carry a quiet voice from one corner to another.

Hotel Meta at 450 Eleventh Avenue looks strange from the wrong angle, but the black blank walls are part of how a skinny Manhattan tower survives its site.

A royal land grant made Trinity Church one of Manhattan's great landholders. The same growth around it now makes preservation a permanent job.

New York's setback skyscrapers were not just Art Deco style. They were buildings squeezed into an invisible daylight envelope.

William Van Alen and H. Craig Severance turned a broken partnership into the race between the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street.