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diodes. The information comes from a real-time feed from the Reuters wire; the numbers appear to speed up as they round a curve leading from the façade of the building—an Artkraft Strauss optical illusion designed, says Tama Starr, “to give the feeling that the information was coming out of the building, crossing the front, and going back into the building to be reprocessed, as if it were a manufacturing process.” This enormous sign, which Morgan Stanley executives once cringed at the thought of, makes a series of essential statements about the company: that it traffics in information and not just in money; that it is a central node and switching device in the global economy; that it is in the moment; and not least of all, that it is cool enough to claim a space for itself in the new Times Square. The sign was, in effect, a branding device both for Morgan Stanley and for Times Square.

By 1997, Morgan Stanley had so thoroughly accommodated itself to Times Square, and all it stood for, that it was looking to expand; it purchased a ground lease from the Rockefeller Group for the parcel on the east side of Seventh Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets. The Rockefellers had long thought of the parcel as the western gateway to Rockefeller Center, and in 1989 had hired the firm of Kohn Pederson Fox to design a building that would essentially incorporate the property into Rockefeller Center. The architect, Greg Clement, had designed a building with Rockefeller Center limestone and a Rockefeller Center top that would line up horizontally with 30 Rockefeller Center, directly to the east. Here was yet another manifestation of the apparently irrepressible urge to subsume Times Square into Rockefeller Center—the urge that had guided Seymour Durst and George Klein and Philip Johnson. And then the market had collapsed, and Clement’s building went into the deep freeze.

Now Clement and Kevin Kennon, who had since joined the firm, went back to work, this time for Morgan Stanley. Kennon says that he came to think of the new building, at 745 Seventh Avenue, as a “hinge” between two geographical axes, and a “hybrid” of the cultures of Rockefeller Center and Times Square. The new Times Square was, itself, a hybrid place—for, just as Toys “R” Us made Times Square into a more “family-oriented” locale by placing its flagship store there, so Morgan Stanley helped erase the distinction between the corporate world of midtown Manhattan and the old honky-tonk world of Times Square.

Kennon is a sandy-haired, soft-spoken man of an academic bent. His father had been the head of the largest corporate architecture firm in the United States and the dean of architecture at Rice University. While still in college, Kennon had studied at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, a study group founded by a group of young architects and theorists, including Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton. One of Kennon’s fellow students was Rem Koolhaas, who was working on a project that ultimately became Delirious New York, a manifesto that celebrated Manhattan’s raw power and indifference to traditional aesthetic standards, somewhat as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour had done with Las Vegas. Koolhaas wanted to celebrate Times Square, and its frankly commercial and bluntly sexual traditions, rather than gentrify or erase them. In fact, Delirious New York includes a project Koolhaas called the Sphinx, a giant complex facing the Times Tower that would combine the functions of hotel, apartment house, sports complex, nightclub, auditorium, and sex parlor. Kennon was neither the theorist nor the radical that Koolhaas was, but the Institute gave him a critical language and approach that allowed him to operate beyond the conventions of corporate architecture.

At Kohn Pederson Fox, Kennon had designed the highly regarded new Sotheby’s headquarters on the East Side of Manhattan, as well as the Rodin Museum in Seoul, a structure made almost entirely of glass and thus open to passersby and to cars whizzing past. An architecture critic wrote that the