David Moo is a 20-year veteran bartender whose cocktails and bar commentary have been widely published in books, magazines and newspapers. In addition to his work consulting on bar design, bar operation and menu design, he creates and prepares cocktails for a wide range of events like those detailed in this book. In his spare time, he is the owner and manager of quarter Bar, Brooklyn's oldest post-revival cocktail bar.

As Michael Murphy has tried to emphasize using local sources in his constructions, he very much wanted me to incorporate that premise into his cocktail. So I turned to New York Distilling’s Brooklyn-made rye to reboot a version of the old Liberal cocktail.

Bart’s body of work is immensely impressive, so I felt a little devious basing a drink on a single magnificent design he did for a helix-shaped control tower for LaGuardia Airport that, following 9/11, never got built. But he was magnanimous about it, laughing along. This called for a tall drink, not a far cry from the classic old Queen’s Park Swizzle.

Bing Thom was such a sweet fellow, and his predominantly white, airy, soufflé-like constructions called for a drink of exactly those same qualities. Though the Ramos Gin Fizz, another old New Orleans drink, is revered and despised in equal measures by bartenders for its labor-intensive build, we knew we had to fit it to Bing’s lecture.

For Daniel Libeskind, I wanted to push myself to create the purest iteration of a cocktail I could imagine: a clear, unadorned drink that incorporates all the elements of a full-fledged cocktail. For this, I took vodka and blended it with fresh shiso leaf and pomelo peels. I put that mixture through first a medical centrifuge and then a rotary evaporator, emerging with a powerful tincture that made for a cocktail that looked like a glass half-filled with water, but blew up the senses: no citrus, no sugar, but every element of a cocktail rendered. To garnish, we had Hundredweight Ice make us hand-carved wedges of pure sculptural ice that emerged from the glass like a monolith.

Given the presence of not one but three architectural eminences, we simply punted here and decided to do a seasonal cocktail, acknowledging the New York-based trio by conjuring a New York Sour that employed a heavily mulled red wine as a float, fresh ginger syrup as a sweetener, and a citrus element, split half, each of lemon and lime.

Taking as our obvious inspiration David’s Museum of African American Culture and History for the Smithsonian, David Moo and I came up with a drink based on a Switchel, the vinegar-based pre-Colonial-era thirst quencher that emigrated with the diaspora of slavery from the Caribbean to the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, taking on various ingredients along the way. Goosed with a roasted banana-infused aged rum, this was a pointedly thematic study in one glass.

Ken Smith was our second landscape architect, and August in New York called for something directly in line with what he suggested as well: light, bright, and frothy. Chartreuse gave this highball a firm structure along with that beguiling green, perfectly reflecting someone whose life is spent in verdant pursuit.

The two Davids’ combined work was impossible to sum up in a single cocktail, so they asked that we conjure one cocktail that could function equally well with two different base spirits, Old Tom gin for David Hollenberg and tequila for David Piscuskas. Both were gratified with their respective cups.

As Marion and Michael had just released the book Public Natures, relating architecture to landscape, and had recently completed the redo of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden buildings, I wanted something referencing green. Michael grew up in Italy and loved the Negroni, while Marion cleaves almost uniquely to prosecco. That led naturally to a Negroni Sbagliato, clarified and with one tiny aromatic embellishment from cucumber.