He immediately ordered the city to cover the eyesore with a temporary facade made of painted fabric for the duration.
With an uneven facade made of glass, steel and a pale limestone called Alabama stone, the building is likely to stand out.
Sectioned like a barrel cactus or a grapefruit, it has a facade made of huge shimmering steel panels and is topped by a steel-and-fabric retractable roof.
Ms. Selldorf's no-nonsense facade, made of stainless steel and cobalt blue back-painted glass, sits comfortably in its surroundings.
Holly Hotchner, the museum director, said the choice of a facade made of clay, fired into a warp-and-weft pattern in terra cotta, "speaks to who we are" -- an institution concerned with material and craft.
While Club Zanzibar no longer exists, it is immortalized in John Parris's "Lincoln Motel Birdhouse" (2006), a scale-model birdhouse imitating the motel's brick facade, made of wood, metal, asphalt and paint.
What they got in return was a modern home that bears more than a passing resemblance to a 1960s hi-fi stereo, complete with a front facade made of ash and tinted glass, and a slatted-wood base that recalls a vintage stereo speaker cabinet.
The further back you go, the more midcentury the disposition; at the back is a double-height living area and a rear facade made of rigidly geometric window panels based on those in the Los Angeles home of Charles and Ray Eames, the darlings of American modernism.
Built five years before Mr. Gilbert's more famous F. W. Woolworth Company Building, which happens to overlook ground zero from the northeast and was undamaged in the attacks, 90 West Street has a Gothic facade made of two layers of terra cotta totaling more than a foot in thickness.
It's the details that count here, from whimsical flourishes – the colourful toy cars that adorn the ceiling of an otherwise minimalistic bathroom, for instance – to design tie-ins with the very cars to which the centre pays homage, like an exterior patterned facade made of bamboo – which also is used inside Lexus cars, Katayama notes.
