New York City’s greatest urban design masterpiece is, of course, its grid. With its non-hierarchic, Cartesian logic laid relentlessly across Manhattan’s terrain, it spread northwards from the island’s original Dutch settlement around Wall Street, extending across farms, rocks and swamps alike. Uncompromising in its simplicity, it eventually encompassed the whole island. The City Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 still defines the city today.

The plan has proved remarkably resilient, absorbing more than 215 years of development without losing its underlying order. Laid out on a 200x400ft grid of blocks, with 155 narrow east-west streets and 12 wider north-south avenues, it was originally designed when the city’s tallest structures were church spires and most buildings rose no higher than three to four stories. Those same blocks have since absorbed both the birth of the skyscraper and the blight of gridlock.