When the original competition for the New York Times Building was announced, an executive of the newspaper was quoted as saying, "We want a building that is an icon." Piano and his collaborators have given the Times—and its 10,000 employees—something more valuable: a really good workplace. The New York Times Building isn't perfect, but you have to go back to the 1950s and the glory days of SOM and Gordon Bunshaft to find a commercial office building designed with a similarly strong sense of conviction. More recent Manhattan towers have demonstrated chiefly nervous novelty: sliced-off Citicorp, chopped-corner IBM, quasi-classical 60 Wall Street, enlarged Chippendale AT&T, and pyramid-topped World Financial Center. American architects who, after all, invented the skyscraper, appeared lost. Who would have thought that it would be Europeans—Piano, Foster, and soon Rogers at Ground Zero—who would be the ones to show the way?