Architect David Childs is having a major impact on the skyline of New York. “At Skidmore Owings & Merrill, you don’t know what my next building will look like. You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there’s a style. I’m more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.” Buildings as “egoistic big statements,” as Mr. Childs put it, do not interest him. Making the fabric of the city is what excites him most: how streets thread their way through avenues and parks, how they open vistas to rivers or create a neighborhood.”