The interim logo for JetBlue’s new Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport showed the abbreviation T5 rising like a phoenix behind the iconic roofline of Eero Saarinen’s 1962 TWA Terminal. The graphic expressed a literal truth: the new $743 million, 26-gate terminal sits directly behind TWA, embracing it with a series of gently curved roadways and a façade of dark gray steel and glass. It also expressed the hopes of many in the preservation community that TWA (or at least its spectacular reinforced-concrete symbol) would live, making flying seem as glamorous as it had in the 1960s, when jet travel was a breathless innovation.

For those of us who try to resist conspiracy theory’s undertow, the March 21 news that all parts of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project but the arena are “stalled” was a definite blow. No “Miss Brooklyn,” the mixed-use tower set to be the tallest in Brooklyn. No residential towers, containing 6000 market-rate and middle- and low-income affordable condominiums and rentals. And no new, lower-rise neighborhood organized around an eight-acre Olin Partnership-designed park. Instead, Brooklyn might just get the kind of sitting-duck arena that has failed so often in urban settings (see Madison Square Garden, soon-to-be demolished until the same economic crunch that stalled Atlantic Yards did the same to the Moynihan-Penn Station redevelopment).

American architecture has been rather devoid of photogenic Young Turks in recent years — the architect with the most buzz at the moment is Philip Johnson, yet again — but in the U.K., the designated star is David Adjaye. The Ghanaian, Royal College of Art–trained architect, 40, built his reputation designing tough, opaque houses in rapidly gentrifying London neighborhoods: masklike gray façades on the outside, lots of open space within, for cool artistic types like Ewan McGregor, Jake Chapman, Sue Webster and Tim Noble. He’s since moved up in the world. In June, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire by the queen for services to architecture, following several public works — like his Idea Stores, which have shaken up the notion of the library and his Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. And now he’s coming to America. The exhibit “Making Public Buildings” opens this week at the Studio Museum in Harlem; his New York office opens this year; and his Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver opens this fall. Adjaye spoke to Alexandra Lange about public vs. private, Africa and New York and what it’s like when a client attacks you in the press.

Tooling around the outer edge of Governors Island on a glorious spring day, it hardly seems like it would be difficult to motivate people to go out there. What you see looking out is the movie version of New York City, the coming-to-America view of the Statue of Liberty, the glittery skyscrapers along the Battery. What you see looking in is Nolan Park, a charming row of yellow clapboard houses, flowering trees that shiver pink petals over the lawns; Fort Jay, its bermed sides covered in grass—and, on the South Island, an 80-acre wasteland of Coast Guard structures, slowly falling to pieces.

During her first week of work as executive director of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Christy MacLear 1) wrote to Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, asking her to pull together a list of what turned out to be 300 of Johnson’s closest friends; 2) scheduled emergency tree pruning on the 47-acre property; 3) hired WASA Studio A to design a visitor center; and 4) solidified the opening date for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s first modern site: April 2007. The nearness of that date accounted for much of the urgency. MacLear’s first week was in mid–June 2006, so she had less than a year to prep the site, hire a staff, and plan the events to launch a house always publicized but never open to the public.

We are a city of 8 million people, give or take a few hundred thousand. But we are building a city for 9 million. Literally. Right now. That will be New York City’s total population just a couple of decades hence, and politicians, bureaucrats, developers, architects, and engineers are, as you read these words, figuring out how to fit another million people onto the collection of islands and peninsulas we call home. We can’t just bulldoze and slap up some towers—we’ve learned some lessons from the sixties—and it isn’t just half a million new homes that we need. Those million need offices, factories, labs to work in. They need subways, buses (and ferries and trams) to commute in. They need places to park and places to play, plus the power to light their homes. All in a city that can’t sprawl.

The objects in the Museum of Modern Art’s latest design exhibition, Safe: Design Takes On Risk, can be divided into three categories: disasters, annoyances, and kids. (For some the last is a less than ideal combination of the first two.) So we have the wall-mounted Sea Shelter (designed by Nikhil Garde for Designskolen Kolding), a life raft crossed with a tent that provides easier access from the roiling ocean, protects from the elements, and can be oriented toward others trapped in a real-life version of Lost. But across the room there’s the Stokke Xplory baby stroller (by Bjørn Refsum and Hilde Angelfoss Øxseth), a bassinet crossed with an ostrich that is easier to wheel down city sidewalks, shields infants from pollution, and keeps them closer to adult cooing level.

The complexities of designing the Modern, the restaurant at the expanded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), started at the door. The museum wanted an amenity for visitors and trustees: an in-house eatery—accessible from within` the building—whose food was up to MoMA’s stellar standards. Danny Meyer and David Swinghammer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) includes Zagat stars Gramercy Tavern and the Union Square Cafe, wanted to create a new Midtown icon with its own entrance from 53rd Street. To add to the challenge, the restaurant space also had to cross three decades of building: Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’s 1939 International Style gem, Philip Johnson’s 1964 steel-framed wing, and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Bentel & Bentel, the Long Island-based architecture firm hired by the museum, had to figure out how to negotiate these complementary and conflicting goals to satisfy both clients while not turning the restaurant into some sort of mid-century theme park.

Murray Moss makes an unlikely Miss Manners. A man more simpatico with Gaetano Pesce resin chairs than place cards, Moss, the owner of the famous SoHo design emporium bearing his name, says, “I had no idea how much a wedding cake cost until Nicole showed me one day.”

“The model for MoMA is Manhattan itself,” says its architect, Yoshio Taniguchi. “The Sculpture Garden is Central Park, and around it is a city with buildings of various functions and purpose. MoMA is a microcosm of Manhattan.”

It’s always been hard to see the Museum of Modern Art. Neither 53rd nor 54th Street is wide. MoMA has no park to give it contrast, no steps to give it grandeur, and $425 million later, it still has none of those things. What Taniguchi has done, in a renovation of the museum so extensive it amounts to a reinvention, is to have intensified what was already there. There’s a subtle increase in sheen, a blacker black glass than that of the charcoal 1984 Museum Tower, and a whiter white, icier than the original white-marble 1939 façade. His new parts—you have to look closer to see them—make the old make perfect sense. Each gridded façade lines up with the next, like the alignment of the blocks.