Then, gliding back uptown, the ultra-hip little firm Asymptote is making an apartment building out of a garage behind one of the Meier towers, John Pawson has converted part of the Gramercy Park Hotel into minimalist condos, and Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio will soon turn the High Line into one of the coolest city parks imaginable. Farther north and further out—2012, 2014—Meier envisions three mammoth apartment towers just south of the U.N., the impeccable Japanese modernist Fumihiko Maki is designing a new 35-story building for the U.N. itself, Piano will build his (glassy) addition to the Whitney . . . and so on.

But how can we be a city of glamorous cutting-edge architecture without finally getting our own Frank Gehry building or two or—hell, sure, why not—nineteen? The first, under construction on the West Side Highway in Chelsea, is a nine-story headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp. It’s a new Gehry iteration; instead of an exploded giant tin can, it will be boxier, more traditionally building-esque, with townhouse-size modules and wedding-cake setbacks wrapped in translucent textured glass. “We’re gonna do more things behind there, too,” Gehry says, suggesting a future Gehryfication of Tenth Avenue. “Housing and stuff.”

And next spring, construction should begin on the first Gehry skyscraper on the planet, a 74-story apartment tower (plus hospital and school) just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Given the string of abortive New York projects he’s been through (like the doomed ground-zero theater center), he doesn’t want to publish his design for Beekman Tower “until they’re sure they’re going to build.” But he showed me the renderings. For a Gehry building, it’s conservative, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—a classic Manhattan skyscraper with several setbacks. But for a Manhattan high-rise it’s radical, since it will likely be clad in titanium—creased and wrinkled as if it’s a few yards of draped fabric rather than a dozen acres of metal.

Bruce Ratner of Forest City is the developer, as he is of Piano’s Times building and of what will be a whole new Brooklyn downtown between Atlantic and Flatbush—a Nets arena plus a residential quarter as large as Rockefeller Center with sixteen buildings, all by Gehry. Freddy Ferrer called it “the twin brother of Bloomberg’s West Side stadium boondoggle,” but that’s wrong. The arena is the anchor of a thoroughly imagined project by an actual developer; basketball seasons have 41 home games instead of 8, thus generating more street life; and the architecture will be the work of a single-minded genius, not a big corporate firm. Simply because enormous redevelopment projects are often or even usually misguided (Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, the Jets’ stadium, Freedom Tower) doesn’t mean we ought to oppose them by default. Westway, for instance, should have been built, and so, probably, should Gehry’s Atlantic Yards.

The skewed, cartoony angles of the buildings, which range from 20 to 60 stories, would in one fell swoop create a second, sui generis Brooklyn skyline encompassing the familiar, phallic old Williamsburgh Bank Building. Gehry’s goal is for it to “look like it developed over time. Usually I would bring in other architects to make it look like a city, not like a development.” But many hands at the drawing table (or the CAD screen) is no guarantee of urban quality either: At Battery Park City the result has been, as Ratner says, “a mishmash of architecture.”

Thirty years ago, as the city entered a grotty, seemingly permanent twilight, Red Grooms and Rem Koolhaas produced their retorts to the gloom, the jolly walk-through installation Ruckus Manhattan and the alternative-urban-history book Delirious New York, respectively. Gehry’s scheme seeks to be a latter-day consummation of those visions. It could be magnificent. Of course, executed poorly—say, Battery Park City populated by Arquitectonica’s cheesy, strenuously fun Westin Hotel in Times Square—it could also be dreadful. Until now, most of Ratner’s buildings have ranged from the uninspired to the bad, like his shopping center across from the Atlantic Yards. Even he admits the Atlantic Center mall is “not up to snuff. Philip Johnson did a first design, but I made a decision not to use him. I have to blame myself. I’ve been talking for ten years about trying to use ‘design architects’ instead of ‘developer architects.’ ”

Why does he think New York was so bereft of exciting large-scale architecture for so long? “It’s something I ponder a lot,” he says. “So mediocre.” And most new buildings here are still mediocre or worse—we will have plenty of ’00s versions of sixties-white-brick monstrosities to dispirit us for the rest of our lives, including many (such as the condo high-rise going up at the west end of Chambers Street) trying to ride the neomodern bandwagon.