When this building is finished it will not merely sit on Fifth Avenue, it will grow from it. The Manhattan grid is a fine machine, but it has starved for a curve; here the neighborhood will meet one. The spiral will lean toward Central Park like a cupped hand, borrowing the trees and returning their shadows as moving frescoes across the concrete. Daylight will slide along the ramp in a slow procession so that art is seen in time, not as postage stamps on flat walls.
Taxis will idle and look better for the contrast. The ice-cream truck and the stroller will find a calm eddy under the wide eave. Vendors, schoolchildren, old men with newspapers...this corner will become a little piazza, an American one, made by a single continuous line turned inside out. The neighbors, all right angles and stacked boxes, will discover they have a new horizon to measure themselves against. And at dusk, when the sun burns a brass band across the bands of the shell, the whole block will understand; architecture can be a citizen.
