"I know it helps to sell teakettles," says Graves, laughing immodestly. "I think people might be more curious, at least to go and look at the place, and then it should sell itself without anybody's help." Graves has been at the forefront of architectural branding -- and he's clear about his reasons for wanting his name on a building: "To get better work, to get an article in your magazine, to get people to buy apartments, to engage us all," Graves says, only semi-facetiously. "It's a bit like what Gerry Hines did in the seventies when he hired I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson to design office buildings. Gerry said he had to pay the architects a little bit more but he got it back in spades -- the office-building-design stakes were raised almost overnight by Gerry's success." By contrast, developers tend to get too used to working with one architect, putting up building after building using the same formula. That's how the city got its fleet of (justly unappreciated) white-brick buildings.

Stern, who worked for Mayor John Lindsay's housing department after he graduated from the Yale architecture school, remembers that "there was no market for my skills or the skills of any architect of my generation" in the late sixties. "Battery Park City, if it does no other thing, was the key to changing it. Amanda Burden, Richard Kahan, David Emil, and Stephanie Gelb some of the authors and enforcers of Battery Park City's architectural code realized that neighborhoods are going to be made by buildings that have some distinct qualities. In the early days of BPC, they made the developers and architects live in the buildings for a month after they were finished. Often we design these buildings and we never experience them for ourselves."

And now they can. Graves, who already owns a unit in a Miami Beach high-rise he designed (he also appeared on a billboard for the building), says, "When I don't have a specific client, I do everything as though it was for me." If this project turns out well, he says, he'll consider renting one of the apartments himself.

And even Wine couldn't have imagined the additional publicity value of Stern's moving into one of the Chatham's most coveted spots -- a sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Joneswood Garden, which is maintained by the brownstone owners of 65th and 66th Streets. Stern is moving only because the view from his 77th Street apartment (where he's lived for nearly twenty years) is being ruined by Davis and his partners. The Empire is obliterating half of the Cottages, a picturesque thirties development that Stern the preservationist labored to keep from being torn down. Stern is sanguine about the change: "RFR/Davis is building a very nice building. I am not the architect, but looking at it I think, Oh, this isn't going to be so bad."

Both architects see these buildings as a chance to redress some of the wrong done to New Yorkers (including themselves) over the years. "I've always been interested, as most good architects are, in the prewar buildings," says Graves. "What I most like about those buildings are their plans. It's always striking to me when people in prewar buildings make SoHo lofts out of them by stripping them of detail and knocking down walls. In the anonymous towers, the plans are awful. They are often turned on the bias so when you open the front door -- boo! -- there's the view of the East River. There's no mystery to it whatsoever." You can almost hear Graves shaking his white head. "People don't understand pacing -- how to hold back and give it to you in smaller doses."

The building's entrance also consumed much of Graves's attention. Although the building isn't luxurious, the lobby will be maple-paneled, with a limestone floor. He's also planned an outdoor courtyard between the front desk and the elevators. Davis plans to fill it with bronze statues of impalas -- the African antelopes, not the Chevrolets. "Coming to your house is an important event in anyone's life, and this reflects that," he says. The outside of the building also plays with childhood notions of home: Graves has arranged the windows in four-square groups, like a child's drawing of a windowpane, which makes the building seem much shorter (two floors read as one) and gives the edifice as a whole a building-block appeal.