In a few weeks, ground-breaking will begin on the far West Side. The project: Hudson Yards, the largest real-estate development ever undertaken in the city's history, an enormous mini-metropolis whose planning might have left even Robert Moses dumbstruck. Here, our architecture critic Justin Davidson takes an exclusive look at what all New York will one day enjoy, critique, and gawk at. The project got us thinking big, too. In fact, it seemed like a natural jumping-off point for an issue surveying bigness in design: from the palatial (a 10,763-square-foot house in Paris with a basement swimming pool) to the communal (twelve roommates in one loft in Bushwick). The very concept of "big" has, of course, had a bad architectural rap of late (see the documentary The Queen of Versailles or any newspaper account of McMansion dreams and foreclosure anxiety). And there is no getting around its correlation with excess—as Matthew Shaer chronicles in his story about the new super-luxury condo tower One57, where so many apartments may be trophies first and homes a distant second. But this is an issue about the exciting hold that big design takes on our imagination. It surveys plans for the world’s largest rooftop farm and for a park 43 times the size of Central Park. It takes in a truly green home in Singapore. And, like any good house tour, it luxuriates in the lives of others—including those in the market for a $40,500 refrigerator unit and those who like to share four regular old fridges with eleven non-relatives. In their own way, they’re all living large. read more [+]