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\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Albert Vecerka\/Esto; David Sundberg\/Esto; Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n
For a while, in this century\u2019s early days, it looked as though New York would turn into an architectural Hall of Fame. The competition to rebuild the World Trade Center<\/a> drew a posse of giants. Soon, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, and Bjarke Ingels made their first contributions to Manhattan. But the virtuosos who converged on New York rarely did their best work here, stymied by the demand that any one building subordinate itself to the grand urban collective. Big Icon Architecture didn\u2019t really catch on in New York \u2014 most of the superstars bestowed more flamboyant and idiosyncratic designs on more architecturally permissive cities like Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and Shenzhen. Gehry<\/a>, who died recently at 96, built his major masterworks in Los Angeles and Bilbao, infusing them with enough personality to transform urban life there; in New York, he produced the small and lovely IAC office building and a relatively traditional rental tower that were never going to have that kind of impact.<\/p>\n And so the party petered out. Foster<\/a> and Ingels<\/a> kept getting more chances to add to the Manhattan skyline, not because they were the most distinctive but because their approaches fit seamlessly into the culture of corporate real estate. The past ten years have been a period of architecture without heroes, a forefront without an avant-garde. And that, it turns out, has been a good thing for New York.<\/p>\n The decade has seen new buildings that feel more rooted and less alien than all that precious auteurism portended. The best demonstrate their New Yorkiness in deeper, less formulaic ways than the usual menu of blending in, mimicking olden styles, and matching cornice lines. They are sensitive to the glare off the rivers, the need for a shot of respite or spectacle, the twin appetites for losing oneself in the crowd and standing out in it. Architects who get the city understand they are members of an ensemble cast, finding their mark with a sense of the wide stage and the long arc. They worry less about their own place in history than about how users experience a building as they move through \u2014 or past \u2014 it. They act out an abiding truth: A good building is good at doing what it does. A great building is good at being where it is.<\/p>\n Each architectural era tells a story about the city \u2014 usually in a coherent style. The latest iteration of the New York School doesn\u2019t have a consistent look or a set of visual markers: The buildings aren\u2019t all skinny glass or bulky concrete or swoopy or jagged; they share none of the trademarks that have defined the movements of the past. Instead, the 21st-century city has formed its identity around aesthetic and cultural diversity. That has always been New York\u2019s strength, of course, but the pressure to protect the full spectrum of urban living has gotten more intense because so many subgroups have recently felt besieged. Every new crisis brings a new round in the grim game of \u201cWho\u2019s Fleeing New York Now?\u201d Billionaires, teachers, Black families, recent college graduates, tech workers, artists, tourists \u2014 all have threatened to abandon the city en masse. New York must find ways to make itself more attractive to more, and more varied, constituencies, who might otherwise choose Pittsburgh, Atlanta, or M\u00e9rida. And so a reborn skate park<\/a> is being adapted to welcome seniors, too. MASS Design\u2019s planned library in New Lots<\/a> looks nothing like its Long Island City cousin by Steven Holl. In Morrisania, Alexander Gorlin\u2019s polychrome supportive-housing center, El Borinquen<\/a>, exudes a salsa vibe in a Corbusian frame. As the city has diversified its image as an object of desire, it has also needed, and produced, architecture that varies in scale and silhouette but shares a sensibility.<\/p>\n \n Alexander Gorlin\u2019s El Borinquen Residence in the Bronx. One way to frame that New York state of mind is to tunnel back to the 1980s, when the critic Kenneth Frampton identified \u2014 and proselytized for \u2014 an approach he called \u201ccritical regionalism<\/a>.\u201d The idea was to merge international modernism with local conditions and traditions as a way to resist the deadening mantle of sameness that was sweeping the industrialized world and many developing countries, too. Frampton defined the term largely by what it was not. He abhorred superficial mash-ups, such as popping a pagoda onto a skyscraper. He also repudiated sentimental nostalgia and faux-folk fakery, which he called \u201csimple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of providing a checklist of characteristics, Frampton envisioned an architecture based on people\u2019s real-life experience. The only way to understand such a building properly, he insisted, was to spend time in it, savor the quality of daylight there, touch its surfaces, and hear its resonances \u2014 to feel how design and location meshed. To qualify as critical regionalism, contemporary architecture had to use traditional tropes and local materials in unfamiliar variations, refuse to treat a site as just another blank slate, and use structure in an expressive way, visibly connected to a building\u2019s purpose. (It should also not be overly concerned with maximizing revenue.) Designs that satisfied those requirements could embody what Frampton called \u201cthe idiosyncrasies of place.\u201d<\/p>\n A couple of generations of architects have been trained in this anti-dogma dogma, which has an especially powerful hold outside western industrialized cities. Recent Pritzker Prize winners have married modernism and tradition in varied and magical combinations. The Chinese architect Wang Shu<\/a> incorporated salvaged bricks and tiles into his Ningbo History Museum, embedding the local past into the structure as well as the exhibitions. Francis K\u00e9r\u00e9<\/a> tweaked the traditional earth-block construction technique in his native Burkina Faso for schoolhouses that villagers could build themselves but would be as durable as concrete.<\/p>\n The concept of critical regionalism may seem like a poor fit for New York, that proud engine of globalism, crucible of efficiency, and maximizer of revenue. This is where generic apartment towers pop up<\/a> virtually unnoticed and ubiquitous glass curtain walls shellac Manhattan in a uniform glaze. Here, design choices are ruthlessly dictated by global forces: efficiencies calculated by software, construction methods dictated by precedent and convention, building codes developed over decades, standardized components prefabricated in one part of the world and shipped everywhere else. That\u2019s why New York keeps filling up with loathsome real estate \u2014 big dumb buildings shaped by a plethora of constraints and corner-cutting conventions.<\/p>\n Yet Frampton\u2019s concept does apply, even in our city of off-the-shelf towers. That\u2019s because millions of complicated lives and irrational desires place unpredictable demands on architects willing to understand them. We have hundreds of miles of waterfront still shaking off decades of neglect, neighborhoods that molt and morph, old highways slung across the landscape, colliding street grids, a transit system that was modern several eras ago, zones of poverty and wealth mingling in crazy swirls, forgotten histories, megastructures erected for uses that were almost instantly obsolete, and an ever-shifting menu of new desires. The best of the new New Yorkism finds its way through this profusion, satisfies as many conflicting needs as possible, and does all that with character and panache.<\/p>\n \n One Manhattan Square by AAI in Two Bridges. To understand how the most sensitive and New Yorkiest architecture works, it helps to examine its opposite: One Manhattan Square, by AAI<\/a>, for example. This tinseled slab appeared alongside the Manhattan Bridge in 2019, as mute and alien as the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The base lurks awkwardly on a windblown corner, all cold shoulders and sharp elbows, resenting its neighbors: a public-housing project, a softball field, the FDR Drive, and the bridge footings. The upper-floor residents can see two states, five counties, and midtown from their living rooms \u2014 which means millions can look back at the ungainly tower, their gaze unrewarded. (Living there seems like no picnic either. \u201cThis place is a masterclass in poor design, bad management, and logistical chaos wrapped in a luxury fa\u00e7ade,\u201d reads one typical online review.)<\/p>\n In the hands of global celebrities, that high-handed look-at-me approach can yield marquee clunkers, projects that soak up attention and resources while missing enormous opportunities. Renzo Piano was given an era-defining commission and a special site when the Whitney Museum hired him to come up with a new home near the High Line. But the result is an insecure and fussy interpretation of the West Side\u2019s bulky warehouses<\/a>. (The same is true of his Columbia Manhattanville campus.) Fumihiko Maki\u2019s 51 Astor Place<\/a>, as black and sleek as a seal\u2019s hide, would glamorously adorn the business district of plenty of other cities, but here it managed to kill off the square\u2019s last vestiges of funkiness. And Thomas Heatherwick\u2019s Lantern House<\/a>, theoretically a gloss on the High Line\u2019s culture of voyeurism, reads more like a way to dispose of an overstock of bug-eyed glass bays.<\/p>\n SHoP\u2019s 111 West 57th Street and Brooklyn Tower<\/p>\n \n SHoP\u2019s 111 West 57th Street on Billionaire\u2019s Row. If there\u2019s one architectural quality that sets New Yorkers to grumbling, it\u2019s height. The 1,000-footer, while still considered supertall, is now commonplace<\/a>. (There are 18 of them, with another crop on the way.) But being tall isn\u2019t inherently an urban crime. Size is rarely a bad building\u2019s worst problem, though it does make its failings more obvious. Rafael Vi\u00f1oly\u2019s supertall matchbox stack at 432 Park Avenue<\/a> looked appealingly minimalist when it opened in 2015, a haven of simplicity in a complicated city. Unfortunately, it turned into a billionaire\u2019s bane, whining and jiggling like a bored teenager and threatening to shed bits of concrete dandruff<\/a> onto the plebs down below. Like One Manhattan Square, Vi\u00f1oly\u2019s tower, built for distant vistas, barely notices its immediate surroundings.<\/p>\n By contrast, two other supertalls, both by SHoP, puncture the atmosphere without disdaining the block. Both 111 West 57th Street<\/a>, the world\u2019s skinniest skyscraper, and 9 DeKalb Avenue, a.k.a. Brooklyn Tower<\/a>, grow out of the early-20th-century landmarks at their feet, projecting their deluxe graciousness into the sky. Warren & Wetmore\u2019s 1925 Steinway Hall presides over 57th Street, a limestone memory of classical music\u2019s glory days, and SHoP\u2019s vertical addition draws out its poise, its rhythm, and its showy ease. Up at the top, the crown falls away, feathering to nothing, like a long pianissimo trill, a feat of attention-getting lightness. This is a huge accomplishment, offering a way out of the battle between contextualism and contrast. Instead of having to choose between copying the formulas of the past or repeating the habits of the present, other designers can look to 111 West 57th Street as a model for how to refresh New York\u2019s architectural history by elaborating on its themes. Ornament becomes structure.<\/p>\n \n SHoP\u2019s Brooklyn Tower at 9 DeKalb in downtown Brooklyn. SHoP\u2019s Brooklyn project pulls off a similar feat with even more extroverted theatricality. The tower flaunts its partnership with the Dime Savings Bank, sending the 1908 landmark\u2019s geometrical exuberance rocketing upward in a play of convexities and concavities, glass and trim, darkness and gleam. The result feels like a character in a New York film noir, with a personality strong enough to mortify all the lunkish high-rise condos<\/a> developers have lately inflicted on downtown Brooklyn.<\/p>\n BIG\u2019s VIA 57 West, Daniel Libeskind\u2019s Atrium, SO-IL\u2019s 144 Vanderbilt<\/p>\n \n Bjarke Ingels Group\u2019s VIA on West 57th Street. The past in New York is too sticky to shake off completely. Every demolition, no matter how foregone, leaves someone feeling the loss. (That was my crappy bodega!). And every new construction negotiates with history too. That\u2019s easiest to see when the references are overt, as in any of the neo\u2013Beaux-Arts condos by another recently deceased star, Robert A.M. Stern. But more apparently radical designs too take their cues from precedents, many of them encoded in New York\u2019s idiosyncratic zoning and building code. BIG\u2019s VIA <\/a>at the far western end of 57th Street, for instance, assembles a startling profile from a set of conventional givens. A sawtooth streetwall creates angled bays so residents can see down the block; the perimeter wraps a large open-sided courtyard studded with triangular balconies; and the west fa\u00e7ade sweeps back to a point, giving residents lung-filling river vistas. The swoop-sided pyramid is really a conventional rental building with a courtyard at its heart, like the Belnord or the Apthorp before they went condo. The shape is strange, the lifestyle is not.<\/p>\n \n Studio Libeskind\u2019s Atrium at Sumner in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In a similar vein, Libeskind\u2019s Atrium<\/a>, an affordable-housing building at the edge of a NYCHA campus in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is more historically minded than its sharp angles, bent edges, and tilting walls may suggest. Few building types constrain their designers more than affordable housing, where the politics are byzantine, budgets meager, rules strict, and margins thin. Yet architects keep returning to it, animated by a sense that they can ease suffering and contribute meaning to a city in need. The Atrium is the most deceptively extravagant looking of these recent projects, and Libeskind\u2019s urge to supply quality homes for low-income New Yorkers, he has said, stems from his experience growing up in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative<\/a> in the Bronx. There, working-class immigrants lived in Tudor dignity. The all-white Atrium looks nothing like the Co-ops, but its plant-filled indoor courtyard is modeled on their landscaped common spaces. Residents, many of whom have aged into isolation or come from long sojourns in shelters, now have somewhere safe and warm and supervised where they can get reaccustomed to quiet socializing. Some can even look out their bedroom windows to see if their friends are waiting downstairs. Like the Co-ops, the Atrium can go only partway to addressing social problems with architecture \u2014 and also like those predecessors, it shows how fine modest housing can be.<\/p>\n Most apartment buildings, basic or deluxe, barely qualify as architecture at all, not because they are designed by dolts but because developers (and the zoning code) demand a crushing efficiency. You can see the results of this path-of-least-resistance approach at, say, Fourth Avenue and 15th Street in Gowanus, where the buildings occupying all four corners vie to see which will be most definitively forgotten<\/a>. As a counterpoint to such vending-machine-worthy design, the boutique development team Tankhouse has rejected (most of) the formulas that govern New York\u2019s residential construction and asked the husband-and-wife firm SO-IL to come up with designs that are at once logical and slightly weird. Its 144 Vanderbilt in Clinton Hill<\/a>, straddling a commercial corridor and a brownstone block, looks at first like an alien presence, if only because it\u2019s pink. But the collision of townhouses and tower, balconies and bays \u2014 all those protrusions veering in different directions \u2014 recapitulate the whole trajectory of New York living and resemble a cartoonist\u2019s rendering of the city\u2019s chaotic jangle. It has some shared goodies, but the real selling point is its gardens and idiosyncrasies.<\/p>\n \n SO-IL\u2019s 144 Vanderbilt in Clinton Hill. PAU\u2019s Refinery at Domino, Annabelle Selldorf\u2019s Frick, Studio Gang\u2019s Gilder Center<\/p>\n Preservation comes in many forms: adapting an obsolete building for a new use, renovating it for efficiency, updating its look, or adding whole new chunks. In each approach, the result is sometimes barely more than a grudging nod to history \u2014 a brick wall, a truncated staircase, one column out of a dozen left uncovered with Sheetrock. (Since the landmarks law usually applies only to exteriors, even honored relics get treated this way.) When Cookfox opened the Bank of America Tower<\/a> on West 42nd Street, the firm preserved the fa\u00e7ade of Henry Miller\u2019s Theatre as if it were a strip of orange peel and rebuilt almost everything behind it from scratch: voil\u00e0, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. And refurbishing Philip Johnson and John Burgee\u2019s AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue<\/a> meant ripping out the quirky lobby and replacing it with an utterly generic version by Gensler, a move that was sold as a lifesaving amputation. Both of these communicate a similar lack of sentiment: We\u2019ll keep what we must and shed no tears for the rest.<\/p>\n \n PAU\u2019s Refinery at Domino on the Williamsburg waterfront. The best interpreters of the past understand both that old architecture is the manifestation of New York\u2019s continuing history and that memory isn\u2019t static. Every act of preservation is also an act of interpretation, which means each decision about a lintel or a finial has a specific meaning, whether you acknowledge it or not. At Domino<\/a>, PAU, led by Vishaan Chakrabarti, took on the nerve center of the Havemeyer family, the powerful sugar clan that all but ruled New York through the 19th century. Two Trees, the development company that bought Domino Sugar\u2019s decommissioned plant on the Williamsburg waterfront, demolished most of the structures except for one designated landmark and its sign. Inside the refinery building, Chakrabarti\u2019s team discovered a multistory Seussian contraption for processing sugar packed inside four brick walls \u2014 less a building than a building-shaped casing. How do you protect that crazy shell while recognizing that the task it was built for is never coming back? PAU accomplished that by literalizing the chasm between outward appearance and inner purpose: They scooped out the guts and replaced them with a new glass structure that shrinks from the exterior, leaving a gap for greenery and light. The result reclaims an industrial workplace as a postindustrial one, makes the exterior shell visible from inside, scrambles the alignment of old and new openings (framing views in unpredictable ways), and alludes obliquely to the city\u2019s historical dependence on sugar, shipping, and slavery.<\/p>\n \n Selldorf Architects\u2019 Frick Collection. The fruits of a different robber baron\u2019s depredations gave us the Frick, and Annabelle Selldorf\u2019s firm renovated and expanded it<\/a> using a completely different set of principles from those applied at Domino. PAU\u2019s approach was radical; Selldorf\u2019s was incremental. The Domino renovation dramatizes the distinction between past and present; the Frick\u2019s elides it. Domino adds office space and a camera-ready presence to a new mixed-use neighborhood; the Frick remains a temple of fine and decorative arts, only somewhat bigger. The museum\u2019s requirements were complex and extensive: a newly visitable upstairs with offices refurbished into galleries; better services, storage, and conservation facilities; an acoustically brilliant auditorium; a bigger library; and a more comfortable trajectory from door to ticket to coat check to art. Selldorf supplied those upgrades with additions that wound up looking as if they were always there. The Domino refinery, however, dramatizes how profoundly the mechanisms of New York\u2019s prosperity have changed. Yet both projects salvage New York\u2019s past and repackage it for the future.<\/p>\n Many major institutions have grown by accretion, piling manner upon manner, period on period, glass on stone. The Metropolitan Museum is an assemblage of 21 structures erected over a century and a quarter. The American Museum of Natural History contains a similar mishmash. Any new addition needs to reckon with that motley past. Studio Gang did. The firm gave a new front door to the AMNH\u2019s eclectic and beloved agglomeration of buildings, finding a way to honor the combination of geological timescale, copious collections, and rusticated stone exterior. The new Gilder Center<\/a> \u2014 granite on the outside, shotcrete on the inside, with a seductive composition of concavities and curves \u2014 comes off as a true New Yorker: defiantly eccentric, rough, show-offy, and smart. And like any true urbanite, it\u2019s squeezed between neighbors, content to be part of something unthinkably vast.<\/p>\n \n Studio Gang\u2019s Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History. Marble Fairbanks\u2019 Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center, Sn\u00f8hetta\u2019s Far Rockaway Library<\/p>\n Branch libraries have complicated constituencies \u2014 today\u2019s kids, tomorrow\u2019s immigrants, the block, the city at large \u2014 and meet an ever-shifting menu of needs. The best new libraries are simultaneously specific and flexible. The neighborhoods they serve are constantly changing; the geography is not. Marble Fairbanks\u2019 Greenpoint library<\/a>, which sits on a corner between Bushwick Inlet and Newtown Creek, has a summery, coastal feel thanks to its cedar-plank exterior and plaza with glacial boulders artfully placed by SCAPE. In Far Rockaway, Sn\u00f8hetta<\/a> mapped the hues of an ocean sunset onto the glass fa\u00e7ade. Both firms took seriously the mission to create the architectural equivalent of a campfire on the beach: a convivial center that draws people from a distance and makes them reluctant to leave.<\/p>\n \n Sn\u00f8hetta\u2019s Far Rockaway Library. \n Marble Fairbanks\u2019 Greenpoint library. Compare that collective spirit with the haughty splendor of Steven Holl\u2019s Hunters Point Library, which sits on the Queens waterfront like a concrete sculpture, its amoeba-shaped windows inviting admiration and offering regal views of midtown. The design is seductive, but the branch almost immediately became famous as a building that failed its patrons, with an array of stairs and levels<\/a> that made life difficult for wheelchair users and other people with disabilities.<\/p>\n \n Steven Holl\u2019s Hunters Point Library. Weiss\/Manfredi\u2019s Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center and Susan T Rodriguez and Mitchell Giurgola\u2019s Davis Center at Central Park<\/p>\n \n SOM\u2019s Public Safety Answering Center II in the Bronx. A few recent public projects serve the city without really being part of it. Each is freestanding, isolated, aloof yet attention-getting, to dramatically different effect. SOM\u2019s Public Safety Answering Center II<\/a> in the Bronx, a nearly windowless aluminum-clad cube rising on an artificial hill off the Hutchinson River Parkway, manages to be ostentatious and mysterious at the same time. It\u2019s meant to stand at a defensible remove, a proudly alien presence, moated by highways, parking lots, and a secure perimeter \u2014 the 21st-century version of a medieval keep. All of which is fine for a high-security facility, but it remains more chilly than reassuring.<\/p>\n The most recent addition to this roster of \u201cI want to be alone\u201d architecture is Thomas Phifer and Partners\u2019 pavilion at Wagner Park<\/a> in lower Manhattan, a brown brooding presence that sits oddly in a waterfront park. The double set of concrete arches and silos sits atop a manmade slope and strikes a defensive pose, as if emulating nearby Castle Clinton. (That low-slung stronghold was conceived to protect Manhattan from invaders but instead wound up welcoming new immigrants and hosting the celebrity soprano Jenny Lind. There was no evident need for a spinoff.) Phifer\u2019s fort has more far-flung ambitions, too; though it\u2019s lifted out of the flood zone, it still evokes Louis Kahn\u2019s half-submerged Bangladesh National Assembly<\/a>, deconstructing its circles and bending its thick brick walls. What any of that has to do with the tip of today\u2019s Manhattan is unclear.<\/p>\n Photo: Albert Vecerka\/Esto\n <\/p>\n Almost as if to answer those blocks-on-a-plate, two fine park projects merge architecture and landscape so the structures make the most of the topography. The land shapes the building, more than the other way around. At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden<\/a>, Weiss\/Manfredi inserted a long, curving visitors center that wriggles through the greenery, more like an indoor-outdoor path than a freestanding building. Seeing it is like stroking an elephant: It takes time to apprehend the whole thing, not because it\u2019s big but because it\u2019s complicated and inviting and changes as you move around. In Central Park, Susan T Rodriguez and Mitchell Giurgola tucked the pool-rink combo of the Davis Center<\/a> into a hollow and enveloped the new structure in Olmsted\u2019s landscape. Pathways are draped over and around the building, reshaping the edge of the Harlem Meer. These projects begin with the premise that steep grades, dirt, and water shouldn\u2019t be considered as annoyances to be cleared away before construction can begin but instead as the sort of constraints that grant a special kind of freedom.<\/p>\n \n Susan T Rodriguez and Mitchell Giurgola\u2019s Davis Center at Central Park. West 8\u2019s Hills at Governors Island, Weiss\/Manfredi and SWA\/Balsley\u2019s Hunters Point South Park, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates\u2019 Brooklyn Bridge Park<\/p>\n \n The Hudson Yards plaza designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz. More even than buildings, the landscape has been transforming the experience of the city, almost always for the better. You still get the occasional sharp-edged, wind-strafed hardscape \u2014 at Hudson Yards<\/a>, for instance, where Nelson Byrd Woltz\u2019s plaza, spiky with glass towers and flanked by an indoor mall, leaves tourists milling confusedly about. But along a shoreline that was once forgotten and polluted, piers have been repurposed for sports, meetups, and solitary retreats \u2014 activities that would have been inconceivable a century ago when the waterfront was a rough, male, crowded, dangerous, and frenetic place.<\/p>\n To visit one of these waterfront parks is to emerge from the city\u2019s dense street grid and behold the vastness of New York Harbor. The best designs ratchet up that drama. On Governors Island, the Dutch firm West 8 mounded the rubble of demolished barracks into artificial hills<\/a> just high enough to create a sense of loftiness and breadth to the views of lower Manhattan. At Hunters Point South Park, by SWA\/Balsley and Weiss\/Manfredi<\/a>, a pathway meanders picturesquely through tidal wetlands, around the headland at Newtown Creek, and up to a cantilevered platform that enacts an ancient outer-borough yearning for the Oz across the East River.<\/p>\n West 8\u2019s the Hills at Governors Island.<\/p>\n Hunters Point South Park, by SWA\/Balsley and Weiss\/Manfredi.<\/p>\n Michael Van Valkenburgh\u2019s Brooklyn Bridge Park seen from the Squibb Park Bridge.<\/p>\n \n Photographs by Gary Hershorn\/Getty Images, David Lloyd\/SWA, Julienne Schaer\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/b38b6ef209ccfd871c7c9a040ed33e7372-Moran-Gorlin-Borinquen-05.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Michael Moran\n <\/p>\n![\"Various](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/7f1c7b4227a04d40116a22c10f547295e8-one-manhattan-square.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Hans-Werner Rodrian\/imageBROKER\/Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n![\"2021DS15](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/bddd89c1d83d6887a839259c430165d847-02-111-W-57th-Photo-by-David-Sundberg--E.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: David Sundberg\/Esto\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/ee4672942fdad67c45d8e4efa02764475e-02-Brooklyn-Tower-Photo-by-Max-Touhey.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Max Touhey\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/2d095510d0ca9f7755c3f7f4c606693fc1-W57-16-08-BIG-2265.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/a745ae2b976fa6337b6c229e2b29ad9f3c-Studio-Libiskind-Atrium-At-Sumner--Hufto.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Hufton + Crow\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/108e1a1c2ef0b69bf7ea45976bec85f735-0326CR-Architecture-Vanderbilt-25-07-SO-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/2b5a37186c1c8d561a946f3087ddc71ae2-04-Front-of-The-Refinery-with-salsa-clas.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Max Touhey\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/f1f801e91951eb8507d6579b56d9ff245a-70th-Street-Entrance--2.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Nicholas Venezia\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/8a480622683e3e6cfc9ddfd790c4e345c1-GilderCenter-AtriumStaircaseLookingWest-.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![\"Far](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/eaf9a81ead8a2e993a3d4dd7815a2dece1-far-rockaway-library.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Jeff Goldberg\/Esto\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/bcc5605321fe282276433e658b3ef59bed-0326CR-Architecture-MFA-GreenpointLibrar.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Michael Moran\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/e9e831aa3de1dce0c492120a15f7d5642b-hunters-point-library.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n![\"PSAC](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/73fef1279b1a61cd431a11ef6a8230e56f-PSACII-SOM-AlbertVecerka-Esto-2016AV55--.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Albert Vecerka\/Esto\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/8156ba47fb9012f22949a1842058a35dea-BBG-Albert-Vecerka.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/e087dd3a2c809a9c9e1cee70e54e15bdae--Richard-Barnes-Horizontal-Aerial-View-o.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Richard Barnes\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/083b36ca20a041b64cc8b5f0d942ea0bb3-hudson-yards.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Stas Moroz\/Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n