It would beautify the country by removing poles and lines and cables from every landscape and cityscape.
"It's really sturdy; our ideal design was exactly what we have, which is light on all four sides," Ms. Walker said, "where you see every kind of cityscape".
She looked back at all the buildings she had seen in Hong Kong, Europe, and America Hong Kongg, a city of dense population and high-rise apartment towers, was an especially useful reference: behind that ultramodern cityscape, every inch of space had been carefully calculated.
Since then, virtually every change in the cityscape has been made by private investors acting alone or in partnership with some public authority.
Another Upper East Sider, a turquoise-eyed gray cat named Sasha, is framed by a fancifully assembled cityscape (not every image that Ms. Vang Olsen concocts is perfectly literal) that features the Chrysler Building, the East River, Roosevelt Island and a sliver of Brooklyn.
Perched high in the south tower of the Time Warner Center at 25 Columbus Circle, a glassy corner condominium with unobstructed northern and eastern views of Central Park and the cityscape from every room sold for $13 million, the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.
They barely glance at what looks like just another huge construction project in a cityscape that changes every month.
As Mr. Menino's time in City Hall runs out, the pace of development is accelerating, evidenced by the construction cranes puncturing the cityscape at virtually every turn.
It's hard, indeed, not to be struck by the almost willful refusal to consider the humorous — and, indeed, the amusing, the pleasurable, the beautiful — in Franzen's work: a body of writing in which every landscape is a landfill (all three of Franzen's novels are, in fact, filled with surreally detailed descriptions of blighted cityscapes), every season is rainy.
