New York has often built great things in bad times, sometimes by accident—the Empire State Building, finished in the Depression, was started in the boom times of the nineteen-twenties—and sometimes by intention, as when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., distracted us from our economic blues by building Rockefeller Center. We now live in a different world, more inclined to celebrate the fact that these dismal economic times mean that the biggest projects on the drawing boards, the mega-developments of Hudson Yards on the site of the West Side Railyards and Atlantic Yards on the Brooklyn rail yard, are not happening. Nobody thinks Bruce Ratner can afford to turn Atlantic Yards into his very own stimulus package, the way Rockefeller did with his project, and we are generally glad of it. In fact, it has seemed to many New Yorkers as if the economic downturn has allowed us to dodge some major bullets.

It would be churlish to call our financial troubles one of the best architectural events of the year, however much they give us a Scrooge-like sense of satisfaction. So in the spirit of this positive-thinking season, let me look instead at some things that have actually happened, rather than at some things that have not, and offer up the ten most positive architectural events of the year.