The Urban Grid

Kurt Andersen walks the streets of Lower Manhattan with Marilyn Taylor. She is the chairman of the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — and heads its urban design and planning practice. Her firm is rebuilding 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings destroyed alongside the towers. On a late spring afternoon, they walked around those blocks toward the empty World Trade Center site, and Kurt asked her why the grid is so central to the process of making cities. Produced by Leital Molad.