A five-level atrium on Church Street contains spiraling escalators and balconies that access a wide variety of restaurants and shops, enlivening the urban realm. Eataly, a gourmet Italian restaurant and food store, occupies the entire third floor. That floor is a through floor, allowing visitors to walk west and see panoramic views of the memorial plaza.

Diana Horowitz has been painting the site’s rebuilding from the upper floors of Silverstein’s World Trade Center towers since 2007. Her luminous, elegiac oil paintings, such as World Trade Center Reflecting Pools and Harbor (2011), capture the extraordinary views and distinctive quality of light downtown.

Inside, the spacious lobby has 47-foot (14.3 m) ceilings and clear glass windows that frame views of the memorial across the street. The main lobby wall is made of fine-grained black granite that, polished to a high sheen, reflects the memorial, the plaza trees, and the viewer in its surface. Seeing a slightly blurred, hypnotic reflection of one’s own face juxtaposed with the 9/11 Memorial achieves the same effect that Maya Lin used to create a supremely subjective experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Here, surrounded on both sides by the actual memorial and its reflection, there is a sense of going back in time—to the events of September 11 and, further, to a time outside of time.

In contrast to the sleek lobby, the elevator corridors partake of primeval beauty. The corridor walls are finished in a honey-colored anigre wood, whose grain recalls the canopies of the memorial trees and reminds visitors of what they’ve just seen through the front windows. It is coated with seven layers of liquid plastic that protect the wood and impart a mirror-like reflection. Anigre slats on the ceiling recall the sliding screens and roof rafters of traditional Japanese wood construction. Most compelling, however, are three floor-to-ceiling video installations that depict ever-changing scenes of nature on the far walls of each of the corridors. Traveling still deeper, one makes a ninety-degree turn to enter the elevator banks, which are lined in pure white Thassos marble. The walls inside the cars are stainless steel, with an illuminated white ceiling. As one rises up to the office spaces and toward the literal clouds, the metaphoric journey—from earth (black granite lobby) to wooded nature (elevator corridors) to the sky (white marble elevator banks)—is complete.

To preserve the unsurpassed views of lower Manhattan on the upper floors, the skyscraper’s perimeter columns—four sheathed columns, paired in twos—were placed at the edges, which permitted eighty-foot (24.4 m) spans of floor-to-ceiling glass. Structural engineers Leslie E. Robertson and Associates, who also worked on the Twin Towers, accomplished the span, unprecedented in New York City buildings, by using a very deep, eighty-foot (24.4 m) girder. The edge columns are set away from the corners, yielding column-free corners that add to the tower’s ethereality. Tishman/AECOM constructed the building. AAI Architects was the architect of record, while Beyer Blinder Belle served in that capacity for the retail portion of the project. Jaros Baum & Bolles provided mechanical and electrical engineering for the tower, and AKF Engineers provided these services for the retail component.

Also on the upper floors, hidden from view, is a sky-high arts colony that has flourished since 2005. Larry Silverstein gave artists—painters, photographers, and filmmakers—workspaces on the raw, unleased floors of Seven and then Four World Trade Center. “There were no expectations from Silverstein for rent or a painting or acknowledgment. Literally, nothing was asked of us. They bent over backward to make things comfortable and easy,” said Diana Horowitz, one of the artists who has benefitted from the developer’s largesse. Once Seven was fully leased, the artists who were working there, including Horowitz, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Marcus Robinson, and Todd Stone, moved to the upper floors of Four World Trade Center, where they had front-row seats to the hive of construction activity and 360-degree vistas of New York’s harbor, rivers, and bridges.

The sensibility implied by oku is gaining traction. Technology has untethered presence from place: one need not leave one’s living room to take part in a worldwide conversation. Similarly, the city is a unique reality for each person, constructed according to the relationship an individual has with a handful of the places—one’s neighborhood, workplace, or favorite bar, for instance—that make up the larger whole. Today, Maki observed, “there are a thousand modernisms for every thousand persons.” These multiple, evanescent mental landscapes, rather than physical structure, create the city. In this context, the conceptual thinking behind Four World Trade Center’s minimalist design can be better understood. The tower’s glass façade both conceals and magnifies what is most essential. Partaking of every passing cloud, it presents an ever-changing face to passersby, all of them peering intently at their cell phones, living in the digital cloud.

Fumihiko Maki, seen here in a self-portrait, was born in Tokyo in 1928. He recalls Tokyo as a “great garden city” before U.S. warplanes firebombed it in 1945, reducing sixteen square miles (41.4 km²) in and around the city to ashes and claiming more than 80,000 lives. After studying under Kenzo Tange at Tokyo University, Maki left Japan in 1952, first attending the Cranbrook Academy and then Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He was one of the first Japanese architects to study and work in the United States after World War II. During his extensive travels, the young architect experienced firsthand the relationship between architecture and the city, developing “the notion of an urban order based on a collection of elements,” which would guide much of his future work. He was part of the avant-garde Metabolist group, an influential Japanese architectural movement in the 1960s that held that cities were living organisms and should grow organically, propelled by a natural metabolism. After working with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York (1954–1955) and Sert, Jackson and Associates (1955–1958) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he returned to Tokyo, opening his own firm, Maki and Associates, in 1965. Foremost among his many international distinctions is the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, which he received in 1993.