Diversity and competition are essential and he rejects attempts to reverse urban decline by building art galleries à la Bilbao as "edifice errors".
Somehow, like Cynthia Ann's kidnapping, "an assault on the urban workplace" (global capitalism's edifice complex) had to be rewritten as "a threat to the domestic circle," and so we willed ourselves "back onto a frontier where pigtailed damsels clutched rag dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return them to the home".
The glass edifice of Hotel Urban is a fine example of art-inspired cool and a wonderful counterpoise to the more classic approach of many five-star hotels in Madrid.
To the southwest, on the corner of Maxwell Road and Kadayanallur Street is the modern edifice of Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Created to mark the new millennium, the gleaming new edifices are replacing such urban chancres as derelict steelworks and neglected quays.
Katherine Gustafson of ArchitectureWeek thought the building "succeeds as a monumental edifice befitting its place in the urban frame of the National Mall" while Nathan Guttman of The Jewish Daily Forward described the headquarters as an "architectural gem".
Wheeler finds Trollope to have a "voice that sings" from the pages of the often peppery "Domestic Manners," and she relishes the opportunity to detail her subject's extravagant failures, first in joining a short-lived utopian community in Tennessee, then in constructing an elaborate limestone edifice in frontier Cincinnati modeled after England's thriving urban exhibition halls.
Some grander efforts lie unfinished – vestiges of an urban sprawl that came to an abrupt halt – and with these edifices it is possible to see the Nabataean technique of carving from top to bottom.
Some may disagree, but it seems likely that Townshend's book will be the definitive account of what started as little more than an urban skirmish and in the end proved to be the first serious crack in the edifice of the British empire.
One competitor is Linden78, a brown-brick edifice on 78th Street off Broadway that appears to have recovered from setbacks: In 2009 its developer, Urban Residential, had to give buyers their money back after missing construction deadlines.
