In November 2014, the Sunday Metropolitan section published an article about a man named Jim Venturi and his audacious plan to overhaul transit in New York. His ideas were big stuff: close Rikers Island and use the land for runways for La Guardia Airport; connect them to subways and railroads by a huge new station and convention center in the Port Morris section of the Bronx; create another transit hub and business district in Sunnyside, Queens; add a light-rail line from Red Hook up through Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn to western Queens.

Mr. Venturi, whose father, the prizewinning architect Robert Venturi, once said, “Less is a bore,” compared the scale of his vision to that of Robert Moses. One urban planner called the ideas “a fantasy.”

And yet.

In recent months, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, have called for closing Rikers; Mr. Cuomo announced a $4 billion redesign of La Guardia, with work starting later this year; and Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a $2.4 billion streetcar line in Brooklyn and Queens.

Time for another visit to Mr. Venturi.

His thinking cap is still where we left it, in an apartment on Riverside Drive, but Mr. Venturi, 44, has since moved out to live with his girlfriend, making work space on a recent afternoon for four members of ReThinkNYC, the urban planning studio that has arisen from his original, almost hobbyist plan. The day was warm and the afternoon sun poured through the open doorway to the 19th-floor terrace. Young men in white shirts and whiskers tapped at large black computers. Mr. Venturi breathed the heady air of springtime in New York.