Architecture
The building form most closely associated with New York City is the skyscraper, a pioneering urban form that saw city building shift from the low-scale European tradition to the vertical rise of business districts. Surrounded mostly by water, New York's residential density and extremely high real estate values in commercial districts saw the city amass the largest collection of individual, free-standing office and residential towers in the world.
New York actually has three separately recognizable skylines: Midtown Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, and Downtown Brooklyn. The city has architecturally important buildings in a variety of styles, including French Second Empire (the Kings County Savings Bank Building), gothic revival (the Woolworth Building), Art Deco (the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building), international style (the Seagram Building and Lever House), and post-modern (the AT&T Building). The Condé Nast Building is an important example of green design in American skyscrapers.
The historic residential parts of the city have a distinctive character defined by the elegant brownstone rowhouses and apartment buildings which were built during the city's rapid expansion from 1870–1930. Stone and brick became the city's building materials of choice after the construction of wood-frame houses was limited in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1835. Unlike Paris, which for centuries was built from its own limestone bedrock, New York has always drawn its building stone from a far-flung network of quarries and its stone buildings have a variety of textures and hues.
(Source: Wikipedia.org)
