A woman walks into a bar. Seated at the barstool, wide-eyed, poised and expectant, she is about to raise a drink to her lips, when the bartender, a grizzled New York type, leans across the counter and asks, conspiratorially, “So, whadda ya think about Daniel Libeskind ?”

As funny as it sounds, it’s a true story—one that exquisitely sums up a moment, encapsulates it within a specific milieu, and the words would make the pitch-perfect line for a New Yorker cartoon. When she described her actual experiences in the saloon, the woman in question, an architectural historian, had been making a larger point that architecture had decisively entered the popular consciousness. She recounted her encounter with a kind of bemused awe, but it also made a hee-haw tale, a slap-your-leg line right out of Letterman. If the fragile world finds itself longing for good news, here, at least, was one happy improvement we are pleased to report: Architecture has finally gone mainstream.