At minimum, imported talents just passing through town — however talented they may be — don’t intimately know the place they are working in. Sometimes it’s as simple as not understanding the climate. When New York-based Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed the IDS Center in Minneapolis, they included a glass-roofed atrium, which has on occasion been cordoned off during the winter because of leaks and glass breakage as fragments of ice fall from the adjacent tower. Gehry’s Stata Center at M.I.T. experienced similar problems.

More to the point, a true sense of place is an abstract and rather elusive concept. Cities have their own patterns of building, influenced by the pace of life, the quality of light, historic traditions or simply the materials available. Buildings that acknowledge these patterns reinforce the sense of a particular place — they belong. Sparkly, effervescent Venetian Gothic belongs to La Serenissima, just as severe stone Georgian belongs to Edinburgh. And when we are in these cities, they make us feel that we belong, too. To invert Gertrude Stein, there is a there there.

A local architect senses the there instinctively, not just intellectually. To me, Robert A. M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West seems more at home in Manhattan than Norman Foster’s nearby Hearst Tower. It’s not that the British Foster came up with a bad design, but the building, which comes to a halt at the 46th floor, has a sculptural quality that is alien to the New York skyline. Stern, a native New Yorker and a longtime student of its architecture, knows that the best Gotham City skyscrapers have tops. On his home ground, Foster exhibits a surer touch. The “Gherkin,” at 30 St. Mary Axe, is as sculptural as the Hearst Tower, but it is located in London, a city that is still predominantly low, so the unusual shape is more visible and makes an interesting contribution to the emerging skyline, its gray skin complementing the Portland stone of the surrounding older buildings.