At the desk of: Vishaan Chakrabarti

From the November issue: Vishaan Chakrabarti has played the part of architect, developer and urban planner in his peripatetic career. Now Chakrabarti, 44, is embarking on his second year as head of Columbia University’s real estate development program at the School of Architecture. But Chakrabarti is not a typical ivory-tower type. For the five years before he started at Columbia he worked at the Related Companies, where he was the point man on the push for Moynihan Station. Before that he was in the Bloomberg administration as the director of city planning’s Manhattan office, where he led the successful charge to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side. As the first full-time head of the architecture school’s real estate program, the Calcutta native and Tribeca resident is now trying to make the program more internationally focused. He also launched NY2040 to figure out the city’s future infrastructure, rezoning and preservation needs. [more]