Early in Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, asset manager Eric Packer, already a billionaire at twenty-eight, beholds “an undistinguished sheath of hazy bronze glass,” almost a thousand feet high, before he is chauffeured around Midtown on a Homeric quest to get a haircut. The sight triggers a poignant criticism of the ossified lingo we use to talk about architecture.