ABSTRACT

While power in modern times is best abstracted in the skyscraper outline of a city’s financial wealth, the vernacular is most intimately experienced in low-lying residential neighborhoods or quartiers outside the commercial center. In London, the Docklands Light Railway connects the City’s stern office buildings with the brighter, more reflective steel-and-glass or restored commercial centers at Canary Wharf, Tobacco Dock and the Royal Albert Dock, two miles away. In New York, on the other hand, big projects like Battery Park City or the 42nd Street Redevelopment at Times Square seem only to extend institutional precedents by which developers get to build what they want. A city that aims to be a world financial center makes deals with Olympia & York and Kumagai Gumi, welcomes Citibank and Dai-Ichi Kangyo and transplants Cesar Pelli as well as Skidmore Owings and Merrill and Kohn Pederson Fox.