Standing amid this tidal, industrial wasteland, Langewiesche, the chronicler of what he called the "unbuilding" of the World Trade Center, finds himself on familiar ground.

Yet contrary to demolition's enduring status as an architectural crime, the unbuilding of New York has shaped our city as powerfully and poignantly as the storied skyline's construction.

Cities like New York grow in their unbuilding: demolition tends to precede development, most urgently and particularly in Lower Manhattan, where New York City began.

"Building and Unbuilding," organized by Nina Rutenburg Gray, is the more unusual event, for it is about the process of building the old city, something that we almost never think about today.

"The Rise and Fall of New York: Building and Unbuilding Manhattan" is a collection of photographs and drawings that explore the island's changing skyline from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.

The skyscraper is turned into a shish kebab stick for Roald Dahl's Giant Peach, and in David Macaulay's book "Unbuilding," it is taken apart, girder by girder.

The unbuilding of the Grace Bridge took approximately 2 years and required closing the shipping lane for half a day as the main span was cut from the cantilever sections and lowered onto a barge below.

The story that William Langewiesche sets out to tell in "American Ground" is that of the cleanup operation at ground zero - the "unbuilding," as he puts it, of the World Trade Center.

Armed with a worker's badge and a large-format wooden camera, he chronicled the unbuilding of the World Trade Center site, producing a collection of images numbering in the thousands, several hundred of which have been brought together in "Aftermath."

In combining these with the stylized upheaval of the plaster folds, Israel symbolizes this moment in the city's history, or at least his place in it: the "unbuilding" of Los Angeles is integral to the building of a richer, more complex city.

Such are some of the melancholy questions prompted by "The Rise and Fall of New York: Building and Unbuilding Manhattan," a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society (Central Park West at 77th Street) through Aug. 21.

That is, to create a transition structure in the West Bank and Gaza - a new mandate under U.S. or NATO supervision - that would oversee the gradual building of a responsible Palestinian Authority and the gradual unbuilding of settlements.

William Langewiesche has been criticized by families of Sept. 11 victims for "American Ground," his best-selling account of the cleanup operation at ground zero, which takes a dispassionate view of the massive undertaking that the author calls the unbuilding of the World Trade Center.