Sanderson goes on to say: “The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is to discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New york does not lack for dystopian visions of its future; King Kong, climate change, war, and disease have all had their cinematic moments tearing the Big Apple down. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start of history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

The Mannahatta Project is a remarkable reconstruction, using the best of new methods, to develop an accurate picture of what we now know as Manhattan as it existed before the Dutch. Personally, I had no idea of what an unique landscape this island was and how many generations of our ancestors had lived there in abundance. Sanderson points out that the original landscape continues to influence the development of Manhattan to this day and also that the diversity of the its present inhabitants is remarkable. We have replaced one form of diversity with another.

There are three “what If” questions which come to mind: what if we had designed Manhattan to be a balance between the ecology-economy we found there and the economy-ecology we created? What if, though collaborative design and good building over time, we accomplished this fit in the years, decades and centuries ahead? What if ecology and economics - which both come from the same root - are not in conflict if we think about them in a new way and practice them with Architecture as an integrated system?