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And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.

I wanted to experience New York, to look up and see buildings.

I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.

When I first came to New York City, what I was thrilled about was not the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty; it was the fireplugs in the street. These things that Jack Kirby had drawn. Or these cylindrical water towers on top of buildings that Steve Ditko's 'Spider-Man' fights used to happen in and around.

I moved from a mountain with one traffic light to New York City when I was 17, and it was an amazing, eye opening, creative adventure. I would walk through the streets of Manhattan looking up at these huge buildings, amazed that I didn't know a single person in any of them.

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it.

For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.

Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.

I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.

New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.