For many urbanists, the rebirth of Bryant Park means only one thing: a derelict and dangerous public park was leased to a private, nonprofit development corporation who not only turned it around and made it self-sustaining, but also turned it into a real asset for New York City. For landscape architect Laurie Olin, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation may have been his client, but this was a project that set out to save a space in the public realm. It had nothing to do with style and very little to do with personality, except the ability to hang in there and stay flexible as the situation evolved and changed.

For me, the result is an astonishingly beautiful breathing room, sitting just behind the New York Public Library. Supposedly where it has always been. But having walked by Bryant Park nearly every day in the 1980s, I now find the green to be astonishingly big — wider than a football field and nearly as long. It reminds me of walking around Siena's Piazza del Campo, after years of seeing the slides. Paul Goldberger described Bryant Park recently in the New York Times: "At first glance, the park looks almost the same, just a cleaner, fresher version of the old... but the cumulative effect of small changes is to render it a dramatically different place, vastly more open than before, more tied to the street and the city around it."

Indeed, there is much to be learned from a transformation that is so subtle and so dramatic. Luckily the design process and the intense public environment in which it occurred have been recorded and generously attributed in J. William Thompson's lucid text. The Rebirth of New York City's Bryant Park is written in a graceful, concise prose, lavishly illustrated with Olin's initial responses recorded in his sketch book, archival documents on the history of the public uses of the site since 1839, refined presentation drawings of rejected and accepted schemes, the final plans and sections, and a photographic portrait of the current condition and uses. The representations are an analogue for the text and the many voices of experience brought to bear upon this successful process.

With a historian's affection for the telling detail in the representations and the text, this elegantly designed case study demonstrates as much attention to the social as to the physical construction of the park. And in this way — by circling around and weaving together the wisdom of Holly Whyte and his gift to Manhattan, decades of studying their responses to design, the watchful and analytic eye of the faculty and students of City University of New York's environmental psychology program (housed just across the street from the park) the passions of Manhattan's hypercritical design communities and many others whose commitment to the quality of public open space found the opportunity to express itself in this design process — we are easily convinced by the not-so-private, corporate rescue of a public park.

And what about the thousands of other public parks in need of rebirthing? The question may fall just outside the boundaries of a single case study, but only the phoenix-like rebirth of Bryant Park could convince us that the future answers will emerge from the hybridic intelligence of design professionals like Olin and architect Hugh Hardy to orchestrate the operatic process of this design as entrepreneurial as any rogue capitalist and as committed to the economies of clever multi-functionalism as any green guerrilla. They leave me thinking that the success of Bryant Park was finessed by the following strategies reported in the book:

When a budget does not allow a construction to conform to code: declare it temporary and find stage set designers to build it.

Mine the site, and remember that landscape restoration is not a form of taxidermy.

Bury books under the lawn. (On Olin's suggestion there are now 84 miles of bookshelves buried beneath the lawn of Bryant Park.)

Hybridity, after all, is our best chance, and the great tradition of urbanism.

Jamie Horwitz is a declared urbanist now living in Ames, Iowa, where she is an associate professor in the department of architecture at Iowa State University.