Drawing comparisons to an M.C. Escher composition, a pinecone, or even an insect’s exoskeleton, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel is a 16-story steel pavilion with 80 viewing platforms, 154 flights of stairs, and almost 2,500 steps.

“People thought New York was finished,” says Architectural Record editor in chief Cathleen McGuigan, thinking back on the days after September 11, 2001. “People didn't understand how a city could go on.” But in the decade that followed, the city and country did carry on, spurred by tragedy into new conversations about politics, security, and architecture.

New York is infamous for its small living spaces—an apartment so teeny that its occupants must use the oven for storage, or a tenement so tight that the bathtub is in the kitchen.

“The idea was to create a ribbon in the middle of the canyon,” says Hervé Descottes, principal of L’Observatoire International, about the High Line project.

The Four Seasons Restaurant, designed by Philip Johnson in 1959, leaves the Seagram Building with only memories intact.

From the top of Outlook Hill on Governors Island, the 172-acre land mass in New York Harbor, views of New York unfurl in a postcard-worthy panorama: the eye glides from the glossy skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan to the mint-green silhouette of Lady Liberty, across the channel to Brooklyn and the borough’s iconic bridge.