Not long ago, a small midblock building was demolished not far from my office in SoHo. The excision was a revelation. Because of a sequence of low buildings in succeeding blocks, it was suddenly possible to look through a remarkable cut in the city that reconfigured the backs of buildings with their principal facades on the avenues into a long series of fronts. The space is like none other in New York in its proportions and architectonic character, the elegant austerity of the backs of buildings with ornamented facades making a place both lyrical and tough. Looking at it, it’s easy to imagine further transformations, an accessible swath of public space stretching five blocks through the heart of town.

The uneven development of the city—its cycles of boom and bust—drive the production of innumerable morphological accidents, yielding spaces of unexpected character. Behind the building where I had my office several years ago was a parking lot, flanked by an old cobbled street. My building, 14 stories high, was on the eastern side of the space. The other sides were flanked by much lower structures—two-to-six stories—and the accidental plaza that resulted was of a rare proportion. It would have made a superb public space, easily captured and configured.