Toby Cecchini is a writer and bartender based in New York City. He has written about food, wine, and spirits for GQ, Saveur, Food and Wine, and, for over 10 years for The New York Times with his column “Case Study.” His first book, Cosmopolitan: A Bartender’s Life, was published in 2003. He began bartending at the Odeon in 1987, where he created the internationally- recognized version of the Cosmopolitan cocktail. He followed with stints in several bars including Passerby, which he owned until 2008. In 2013, he reopened the shuttered Long Island Bar in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and is currently at work on his second bar in downtown Brooklyn.

The Long Island Bar

Warning that she only occasionally drinks Dark ‘n’ Stormys—and that she was fine with anything but scotch—I had to take a playful jab at Audrey by concocting a type of Dark ‘n’ Stormy with a wisp of an Islay malt overlay: island to island, as it were.

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.

For Charles, our inaugural architect, I had to concentrate on one of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s myriad projects. And so I chose the High Line, a turn-of the- century structure lightened and repurposed for a modern stroll. In so doing, I took a parallel approach to an old turn-of-the-century cocktail, the Vieux Carré, and reinterpreted it accordingly.&nbsp; - Toby Cecchini, November 16, 2012

Something watery and limpid, with green elements, was called for to invoke Claire’s reimagining of the Rockaway Boardwalk following Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. She is an avowed fan of the vodka martini, so I riffed on it liberally

“William Pedersen avowed that he drinks only wine, and is all about “the high-rise commercial office building and all the daily bustle therein.” So my mandate was clear: tall and vinous. Invoking his many Asian projects, I went to fresh lemongrass juice and Buddha’s Hand citron to inflect this take on a French 75, using vodka in place of cognac.” - Toby Cecchini

As Richard was our first landscape architect, I went for a super-clean and super-green hybrid of a Moscow Mule and a Southside, using both freshly extracted cucumber and ginger juice and a spritz of soda atop.

Combining Brad’s Portland, Oregon, roots (rhubarb) with a fresh lemon cordial yielded this cross-up of a Plymouth Martini and a gimlet he insisted upon. I also couldn’t resist the waggishness of giving BradCloepfil, this big, western, virile fellow, a pink drink that perfectly resembles a Cosmopolitan.

Robert Rogers, like every architect, wanted a martini. His edict was: “Let’s get together and talk gin!” So I took the abundant water present in his work as an invitation to, instead, do a gin highball, in fact my favorite one. In this version, you extract and incorporate the precious citrus oil in the lime’s skin, which, as Robert Frost wrote, makes all the difference.

In honor of Hugh’s exclusive preference for the martini, and given the wild variety of his projects over the decades, I decided to present a sort of brief history of the drink, beginning with its perhaps apocryphal forebear, the Martinez, proceeding to the Fitty-Fitty, the small, wet martini that fueled the 3-martini lunch for decades, and finishing with today’s “vulgar” bone-dry vodka version with an olive.

Pegging Morris’s staunchly classical, historically drawn, ur-American structures to a cocktail, and taking into account his Cajun upbringing, led me to a slight updating of the classic Sazerac, a bedrock of New Orleans’ lexicon, here lightened with cognac and a very old American apple brandy.

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.

Creating a drink for Gregg was a straight layup. Not only is he a good friend, but his mandate was simple and direct: “Just use Barclays: dirty, brown, urban, and sexy.” For that, I cobbled what we in the industry call a“brown-and-stirred,” a dark, boozy bourbon (or rye) lowball nudged this way and that with various strong-headed characters wandering in and out: gentian, allspice, orange, but none taking away the supporting structure of the whiskey.

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.

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.

Mark and John having been students of Charles Moore, and Charles, having been not just a martini-only fellow, but also best friends with Hugh Hardy, I had to accede, again, to the martini. As Charles was an iconoclast who borrowed liberally from other cultures, and threw styles together in sometimes shocking fashion, his martini clearly needed some apostate influences that would come together to create a surprising cohesion. A rich junmai daiginjo sake and a vermouth made from a base of Moscatel and fino sherries, paired with a fresh tincture of bergamot and pomelo served perfectly, while never veering from being a real martini.

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.

Toby Cecchini: David and I based Tod’s drink on one single room that inspires us both: the entry hall of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, a perfectly conjured midcentury modern hall that was built only recently. To suit, we wanted to update a midcentury cocktail, the latter version of the Old Fashioned, and bring it into the modern era using roughly the same ingredients.

Eric Owen Moss is famously known for the challenging and angular construction he’s built in Culver City, an LA neighborhood that’s practically inseparable from his work. He mentioned to me that he really only does his drinking in Berlin at 3 am, and this gave me a good opportunity to annoy Toby by asking him for some Kummel.

Tom’s immense planes and Western scope demanded equally large and decisive flavors in a simple, forthright drink with varying thrusts. Marrying a white Armagnac to a Spanish vermouth, with an overlay of mezcal and citrus, brought the kind of surprising beauty Tom’s magnificent structures conjure.

Lee Mindel requested that I put together a cocktail that is evocative of James Turrell’s projects with light. What I came up with required the use of liquid nitrogen, but duplicating the drink at home without it won’t affect the flavor at all.

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.

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.