Over the past decade, the buildings that have stood out embrace the city’s topography and spirit.

By Justin Davidson, New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic since 2007 and was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002.

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto; David Sundberg/Esto; Iwan Baan

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto; David Sundberg/Esto; Iwan Baan

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto; David Sundberg/Esto; Iwan Baan

For a while, in this century’s early days, it looked as though New York would turn into an architectural Hall of Fame. The competition to rebuild the World Trade Center 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’t really catch on in New York — most of the superstars bestowed more flamboyant and idiosyncratic designs on more architecturally permissive cities like Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and Shenzhen. Gehry, 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.

And so the party petered out. Foster and Ingels 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.

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 — or past — 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.

Each architectural era tells a story about the city — usually in a coherent style. The latest iteration of the New York School doesn’t have a consistent look or a set of visual markers: The buildings aren’t 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’s 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 “Who’s Fleeing New York Now?” Billionaires, teachers, Black families, recent college graduates, tech workers, artists, tourists — 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 Mérida. And so a reborn skate park is being adapted to welcome seniors, too. MASS Design’s planned library in New Lots looks nothing like its Long Island City cousin by Steven Holl. In Morrisania, Alexander Gorlin’s polychrome supportive-housing center, El Borinquen, 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.

Alexander Gorlin’s El Borinquen Residence in the Bronx. Photo: Michael Moran

One way to frame that New York state of mind is to tunnel back to the 1980s, when the critic Kenneth Frampton identified — and proselytized for — an approach he called “critical regionalism.” 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 “simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.”

Instead of providing a checklist of characteristics, Frampton envisioned an architecture based on people’s 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 — 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’s purpose. (It should also not be overly concerned with maximizing revenue.) Designs that satisfied those requirements could embody what Frampton called “the idiosyncrasies of place.”

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 incorporated salvaged bricks and tiles into his Ningbo History Museum, embedding the local past into the structure as well as the exhibitions. Francis Kéré 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.

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 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’s why New York keeps filling up with loathsome real estate — big dumb buildings shaped by a plethora of constraints and corner-cutting conventions.

Yet Frampton’s concept does apply, even in our city of off-the-shelf towers. That’s 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.

One Manhattan Square by AAI in Two Bridges. Photo: Hans-Werner Rodrian/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

To understand how the most sensitive and New Yorkiest architecture works, it helps to examine its opposite: One Manhattan Square, by AAI, 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 — which means millions can look back at the ungainly tower, their gaze unrewarded. (Living there seems like no picnic either. “This place is a masterclass in poor design, bad management, and logistical chaos wrapped in a luxury façade,” reads one typical online review.)

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’s bulky warehouses. (The same is true of his Columbia Manhattanville campus.) Fumihiko Maki’s 51 Astor Place, as black and sleek as a seal’s hide, would glamorously adorn the business district of plenty of other cities, but here it managed to kill off the square’s last vestiges of funkiness. And Thomas Heatherwick’s Lantern House, theoretically a gloss on the High Line’s culture of voyeurism, reads more like a way to dispose of an overstock of bug-eyed glass bays.

SHoP’s 111 West 57th Street and Brooklyn Tower

SHoP’s 111 West 57th Street on Billionaire’s Row. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto

If there’s one architectural quality that sets New Yorkers to grumbling, it’s height. The 1,000-footer, while still considered supertall, is now commonplace. (There are 18 of them, with another crop on the way.) But being tall isn’t inherently an urban crime. Size is rarely a bad building’s worst problem, though it does make its failings more obvious. Rafael Viñoly’s supertall matchbox stack at 432 Park Avenue looked appealingly minimalist when it opened in 2015, a haven of simplicity in a complicated city. Unfortunately, it turned into a billionaire’s bane, whining and jiggling like a bored teenager and threatening to shed bits of concrete dandruff onto the plebs down below. Like One Manhattan Square, Viñoly’s tower, built for distant vistas, barely notices its immediate surroundings.

By contrast, two other supertalls, both by SHoP, puncture the atmosphere without disdaining the block. Both 111 West 57th Street, the world’s skinniest skyscraper, and 9 DeKalb Avenue, a.k.a. Brooklyn Tower, grow out of the early-20th-century landmarks at their feet, projecting their deluxe graciousness into the sky. Warren & Wetmore’s 1925 Steinway Hall presides over 57th Street, a limestone memory of classical music’s glory days, and SHoP’s 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’s architectural history by elaborating on its themes. Ornament becomes structure.

SHoP’s Brooklyn Tower at 9 DeKalb in downtown Brooklyn. Photo: Max Touhey

SHoP’s 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’s 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 developers have lately inflicted on downtown Brooklyn.

BIG’s VIA 57 West, Daniel Libeskind’s Atrium, SO-IL’s 144 Vanderbilt

Bjarke Ingels Group’s VIA on West 57th Street. Photo: Iwan Baan

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’s easiest to see when the references are overt, as in any of the neo–Beaux-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’s idiosyncratic zoning and building code. BIG’s VIA 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 façade 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.

Studio Libeskind’s Atrium at Sumner in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Photo: Hufton + Crow

In a similar vein, Libeskind’s Atrium, 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’s urge to supply quality homes for low-income New Yorkers, he has said, stems from his experience growing up in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative 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 — and also like those predecessors, it shows how fine modest housing can be.

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. As a counterpoint to such vending-machine-worthy design, the boutique development team Tankhouse has rejected (most of) the formulas that govern New York’s 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, straddling a commercial corridor and a brownstone block, looks at first like an alien presence, if only because it’s pink. But the collision of townhouses and tower, balconies and bays — all those protrusions veering in different directions — recapitulate the whole trajectory of New York living and resemble a cartoonist’s rendering of the city’s chaotic jangle. It has some shared goodies, but the real selling point is its gardens and idiosyncrasies.

SO-IL’s 144 Vanderbilt in Clinton Hill. Photo: Courtesy of Iwan Baan

PAU’s Refinery at Domino, Annabelle Selldorf’s Frick, Studio Gang’s Gilder Center

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 — 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 on West 42nd Street, the firm preserved the façade of Henry Miller’s Theatre as if it were a strip of orange peel and rebuilt almost everything behind it from scratch: voilà, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. And refurbishing Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue 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’ll keep what we must and shed no tears for the rest.

PAU’s Refinery at Domino on the Williamsburg waterfront. Photo: Max Touhey

The best interpreters of the past understand both that old architecture is the manifestation of New York’s continuing history and that memory isn’t 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, 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’s decommissioned plant on the Williamsburg waterfront, demolished most of the structures except for one designated landmark and its sign. Inside the refinery building, Chakrabarti’s team discovered a multistory Seussian contraption for processing sugar packed inside four brick walls — 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’s historical dependence on sugar, shipping, and slavery.

Selldorf Architects’ Frick Collection. Photo: Nicholas Venezia

The fruits of a different robber baron’s depredations gave us the Frick, and Annabelle Selldorf’s firm renovated and expanded it using a completely different set of principles from those applied at Domino. PAU’s approach was radical; Selldorf’s was incremental. The Domino renovation dramatizes the distinction between past and present; the Frick’s 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’s 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’s prosperity have changed. Yet both projects salvage New York’s past and repackage it for the future.

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’s 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 — granite on the outside, shotcrete on the inside, with a seductive composition of concavities and curves — comes off as a true New Yorker: defiantly eccentric, rough, show-offy, and smart. And like any true urbanite, it’s squeezed between neighbors, content to be part of something unthinkably vast.

Studio Gang’s Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History. Photo: Iwan Baan

Marble Fairbanks’ Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center, Snøhetta’s Far Rockaway Library

Branch libraries have complicated constituencies — today’s kids, tomorrow’s immigrants, the block, the city at large — 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’ Greenpoint library, 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, Snøhetta mapped the hues of an ocean sunset onto the glass façade. 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.

Snøhetta’s Far Rockaway Library. Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto

Marble Fairbanks’ Greenpoint library. Photo: Michael Moran

Compare that collective spirit with the haughty splendor of Steven Holl’s 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 that made life difficult for wheelchair users and other people with disabilities.

Steven Holl’s Hunters Point Library. Photo: Shutterstock

Weiss/Manfredi’s Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center and Susan T Rodriguez and Mitchell Giurgola’s Davis Center at Central Park

SOM’s Public Safety Answering Center II in the Bronx. Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

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’s Public Safety Answering Center II 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’s meant to stand at a defensible remove, a proudly alien presence, moated by highways, parking lots, and a secure perimeter — 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.

The most recent addition to this roster of “I want to be alone” architecture is Thomas Phifer and Partners’ pavilion at Wagner Park 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’s fort has more far-flung ambitions, too; though it’s lifted out of the flood zone, it still evokes Louis Kahn’s half-submerged Bangladesh National Assembly, deconstructing its circles and bending its thick brick walls. What any of that has to do with the tip of today’s Manhattan is unclear.

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

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, 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’s big but because it’s 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 into a hollow and enveloped the new structure in Olmsted’s 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’t 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.

Susan T Rodriguez and Mitchell Giurgola’s Davis Center at Central Park. Photo: Richard Barnes

West 8’s Hills at Governors Island, Weiss/Manfredi and SWA/Balsley’s Hunters Point South Park, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ Brooklyn Bridge Park

The Hudson Yards plaza designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz. Photo: Stas Moroz/Shutterstock

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 — at Hudson Yards, for instance, where Nelson Byrd Woltz’s 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 — activities that would have been inconceivable a century ago when the waterfront was a rough, male, crowded, dangerous, and frenetic place.

To visit one of these waterfront parks is to emerge from the city’s 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 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 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.

West 8’s the Hills at Governors Island.

Hunters Point South Park, by SWA/Balsley and Weiss/Manfredi.

Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Brooklyn Bridge Park seen from the Squibb Park Bridge.

Photographs by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images, David Lloyd/SWA, Julienne Schaer

Roughly a century ago, Alfred Kazin gazed in that direction from a high spot at the Brooklyn-Queens border and “saw New York as a foreign city … brilliant and unreal.” Brooklyn Bridge Park, under the design stewardship of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, has evolved into a new form of urban greenery with hidden bowers, grassy knolls, dense thickets, a bike artery, sports areas, meadows, industrial relics, hardscape plazas, kayaking channels, and wetlands tightly packed between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the East River. That variety, the tough and informal but meticulous detail, the sound-buffering landforms that make it feel at once exciting and serene, and the sheer spectacle of its location exert a powerful magnetic pull on visitors of every age, ethnicity, nationality, and neighborhood. It has become an essential part of the New York experience.

The Best of the New New York Architecture