Many New Yorkers have been following the construction of the new residential tower at 8 Spruce Street, just south of City Hall, with a mix of awe and trepidation.       

Frank Gehry, the building’s architect, has had a rough time in this city. His first commission here, years ago, was for an Upper East Side town house that was never built; his client, an  oil heiress, fired him over Champagne and strawberries. A more recent foray, the massive Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, drew the ire of local activists, who depicted him as an aging liberal in bed with the devil —  a New York City real estate developer.       

The Spruce Street project (formerly called Beekman Tower) would not only be Mr. Gehry’s first skyscraper, but it was also being built for the same developer, Bruce Ratner. And as the tallest luxury residential tower in the city’s history, it seemed to epitomize the skyline’s  transformation from a symbol of American commerce to a display of individual wealth.       

Only now, as the building nears completion, is it possible to appreciate what Mr. Gehry has accomplished:  the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen’s CBS building went up 46 years ago. And like that tower, and Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building after it, 8 Spruce Street  seems to crystallize a particular moment in cultural history,  in this case the turning point from the modern to the digital age.       

The tower, 76 stories high and clad in a rumpled stainless-steel skin, stands at the northern edge of the financial district on a tight lot hemmed in by  one-way streets. The Pace University building, a wide, Brutalist-style structure completed in 1970, cuts it off from the rest of the city to the north; just beyond are the spaghettilike access ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge. To the east, across City Hall Park, are two early landmarks of skyscraper design, Cass Gilbert’s 1913 Woolworth building and McKim, Mead & White’s 1912 Municipal building.       

Mr. Gehry’s design is least successful at the bottom, where he was forced to plant his tower on top of a six-story base that will house a new public grammar school and one floor of hospital services — an odd coupling of private and public interests that was a result of political horse trading  rather than any obvious benefit that would be gained from so close a  relationship between the two.       

The school is clad in conventional orange brick, with heavy steel frame windows that give it the look of a converted factory. Its main facade, with a glass-fronted lobby facing William Street to the east, is relatively straightforward, but it’s a letdown after you’ve seen the gorgeously wrought exterior of the tower above. (Mr. Gehry did not design the interiors of the school, which is still under construction, and students may ask why the pampered young professionals living above them get to live in apartments designed by an architectural superstar while they will have to make do with a no-name talent.)       

Not surprisingly, the two groups won’t be mixing. Residents will enter through a covered drive that cuts through the block along the building’s  western side. Framed by massive brick pillars and a glass-enclosed lobby, the  space’s generous proportions will accommodate taxis and limousines ferrying people in and out of the building, making it feel more like a luxury hotel than a classic Manhattan apartment building.       

None of this matters much, however, once you see the tower in the skyline,  a view that seems to  lift Lower Manhattan out of its decade-long gloom. The building is particularly mesmerizing from the Brooklyn waterfront, where it’s possible to make out one of the deep setbacks that give  the building its reassuringly old-fashioned feel. In daylight the furrowed surfaces of the facades look as if  they’ve been etched by rivulets of water, an effect that is all the more dramatic next to the clunky 1980s glass towers just to the south. Closer up, from City Hall Park, the same ripples look softer, like crumpled fabric.       

(The flat south facade is comparatively conventional, and some may find perverse enjoyment in the fact that the building presents its backside to Wall Street.)       

The power of the design only deepens when it is looked at in relation to Gilbert’s Woolworth building. A steel frame building clad in neo-Gothic terra-cotta panels, Gilbert’s masterpiece is a triumphant marriage between the technological innovations that gave rise to the skyscraper and the handcrafted ethos of an earlier era.       

Mr. Gehry’s design is about bringing that same sensibility  — the focus on refined textures, the cultivation of a sense that something has been shaped by a human hand  — to the digital age. The building’s exterior is made up of 10,500 individual steel panels, almost all of them different shapes, so that as you move around it, its shape is constantly changing. And by using the same kind of computer modeling that he used for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, more than a decade ago, he was able to achieve this quality at a close to negligible increase in cost.       

But Mr. Gehry is also making a statement.  The building’s endlessly shifting surfaces are an attack against the kind of corporate standardization so evident in the buildings to the south and the conformity that it embodied. He aims, as he has throughout his career, to replace the anonymity of the assembly line with an architecture that can convey the infinite variety of urban life. The computer, in his mind, is just a tool for reasserting that variety.       

That mission is expressed inside the building  as well. Mr. Gehry has sometimes been criticized for creating wildly sculptural forms that are nothing more than masks: elaborate wrappers draped over conventional interiors. Here the ripples that run up and down the facades form angular window bays inside, creating pockets of space that give the apartments an unusually intimate feel. They also provide dramatically angled views of the surrounding skyline. (Some apartments will even get occasional, unexpected views between neighboring apartments, a side effect that could be good or a bad depending on how many exhibitionists live there.)       

But in some ways it is the building’s relation to yet another landmark  — the twin towers  — that makes 8 Spruce Street so stirring. Mr. Gehry won the commission to design his building sometime in late 2003, just as the competition to redesign ground zero was heating up. The battles that ensued over that site’s master plan seemed to reflect America at its worst: a volatile mix of government ineptitude, commercial greed and jingoism. Its main emblem, the building formerly called the  Freedom Tower, which is only  taking shape today, remains an emblem of national hubris that is hollow at its core.       

Mr. Gehry’s building, by contrast, doesn’t try to dominate the skyline. Its aims (beyond the obvious commercial ones) are comparatively modest: to celebrate the joy that can come out of creative freedom and, by extension, to reassert the individual’s place within a larger social framework. His interest lies in the clashing voices that give cities their meaning; it is democratic at heart.

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved       

CAIRO — With a new wave of demonstrations in Tahrir Square on Tuesday — by some measures the largest anti-government protests in the two-week uprising — Egyptians loudly rejected their government’s approach to political change and renewed their demands for the immediate resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.       

In a telephone call, Vice President Joseph R. Biden pressed his Egyptian counterpart, Omar Suleiman, to lift the 30-year emergency law that the government has used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders, to stop locking and beating up protesters and journalists and to invite demonstrators to help develop a specific timetable for opening up the political process. He also asked Mr. Suleiman to open talks on Egypt’s political future to a wider range of opposition members.       

In a daily battle for momentum, the government made fresh pledges to create committees to study proposed democratic openings, but demonstrators came out in force to insist that they wanted more than an evolutionary plan by the existing authorities. And the protesters extended their range on Tuesday, with thousands storming the gates of Parliament demanding that it be dissolved.

With many ordinary Egyptians beginning to complain about the economic toll of the protests, the government may still have advantages as the standoff becomes protracted. But many younger people are wary of losing the grass-roots fervor that has brought Egypt to the precipice of historic change.       

The latest wave of dissent was inspired in part by an emotional television interview Monday night with a young Google executive Wael Ghonim, after his release from secret detention. Mr. Ghonim had been a quiet force behind the YouTube and Facebook promotion of the protests, but became a symbol after he disappeared nearly two weeks ago. He became an instant icon Monday when the interview was broadcast on an Egyptian satellite channel, telling his story of detention and continued hope for change that resonated deeply with the demonstrators’ demands for more fundamental shifts and their outrage over repression.       

In the interview, Mr. Ghonim wept over the death toll from clashes with the government. “We were all down there for peaceful demonstrations,” he said, asking that he not be made a hero. “The heroes were the ones on the street.”       

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Ghonim galvanized Tahrir Square, briefly joining the tens of thousands of chanting protesters there. “We will not abandon our demand, and that is the departure of the regime,” he told the crowd, which roared its agreement, The Associated Press reported.       

State television responded Tuesday with an appearance by Vice President Omar Suleiman offering soothing messages of respect and reform that Mr. Suleiman said came from Mr. Mubarak himself.       

“The youth of Egypt deserve national appreciation,” Mr. Suleiman quoted the president as saying in a statement. “He gave orders to abstain from prosecuting them and forfeiting their rights to freedom of expression.”       

Mr. Mubarak named the panel that will recommend constitutional amendments,  and endorsed other moves to create a timetable for a “peaceful and organized transfer of power,” Mr. Suleiman said. Another panel will begin work to progress on other measures Mr. Suleiman  announced after meeting with opposition members on Sunday.       

The president  “welcomed this national reconciliation,” Mr. Suleiman said, “assuring that it puts our feet at the beginning of the right path to get out of the current crisis.”       

After demonstrating their ability to bring hundreds of thousands to downtown Cairo, protest organizers have sought this week to broaden their movement, acknowledging that simple numbers are not enough to force Mr. Mubarak’s departure. The government — by trying to divide the opposition, offering limited concessions and remaining patient — appears to believe it can weather the biggest challenge to its rule.       

“The government wanted to say that life was returning to normal,” said Mahmoud Mustafa, a 25-year-old protester standing in front of Parliament. “We’re saying it’s not.”       

Some protesters handed out spoof copies of the official Al Ahram newspaper with the headline: “From the people of Tahrir, Mubarak must go.” Substantial protests were seen in Alexandria, as well.       

While some demonstrators had urged a general strike on Tuesday, there was little indication that the call had been heeded, or widely broadcast, in the capital, where many people live from day to day on low wages. An Egyptian state newspaper, Al Ahram, acknowledged scattered reports of walk-outs in Suez and other cities, including a sit-in by as many as 6,000 workers from the Suez Canal Authority.       

Momentum has seemed to shift by the day in a climactic struggle over what kind of change Egypt will undergo and whether Egyptian officials are sincere about delivering it. In a sign of the tension, American officials described as “unacceptable” statements by Mr. Suleiman that the country was not ready for democracy, but showed no sign that they had shifted away from supporting him, a man widely viewed here as an heir to Mr. Mubarak.       

Underscoring the government’s perspective that it has already offered what the protesters demanded, Naguib Sawiris, a wealthy businessman who has sought to act as a mediator, said: “Tahrir is underestimating their victory. They should declare victory.”       

Normalcy had begun returning to parts of Cairo on Monday. Chronic traffic jams resumed as the city adapted to both the sprawling protests in Tahrir Square, a landmark of downtown Cairo, and the tanks, armored personnel carriers and soldiers out in the streets. People lined up at banks and returned to shops.       

The government has sought to cultivate that image of the ordinary, mobilizing its newspapers and television to insist that it was re-exerting control over the capital after its police force utterly collapsed on Jan. 28. The cabinet on Monday held its first formal meeting since Mr. Mubarak reorganized it after the protests.       

Officials announced that the stock market, whose index fell nearly 20 percent in two days of protests, would reopen Sunday and that six million government employees would receive a 15 percent raise, which the new finance minister, Samir Radwan, said would take effect in April.       

The raise mirrored moves in Kuwait and Jordan to raise salaries or provide grants to stanch anger over rising prices across the Middle East, shaken with the repercussions of Egypt’s uprising and the earlier revolt in Tunisia. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Friday he would cut in half his salary, believed to be $350,000, amid anger there over dreary government services.       

As in the past, the government here has swerved between crackdown and modest moves of conciliation.       

Human Rights Watch calculated that at least 297 people have died in the protests since Jan. 28, including 232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez. The majority of those deaths occurred on Jan. 28 and 29 as a result of live gunfire, the group reported, relying on hospital lists and interviews with doctors.       

In one harrowing raid, the government arrested 30 human rights activists, but released them by Sunday morning. Fighting still flared in the Sinai Peninsula, where Bedouins, long treated as second-class citizens, have fought Egyptian security forces for weeks.       

CAIRO — Vice President Omar Suleiman insisted  Sunday that President Hosni Mubarak could not step down, and in a significant but limited move held a first meeting with members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and youth opposition groups.       

The encounter itself was remarkable, bringing together members of the brotherhood — Egypt’s biggest opposition movement — and the autocratic government that has for decades repressed it as an Islamist threat.       

But the results were less momentous. While Mr. Suleiman’s office issued a statement — broadcast by state television — saying that talks had produced a consensus on a number of topics, the list reflected promises the Egyptian government had already made.       

The opposition groups, a disparate array that has no central leadership but has unified around the demand that Mr. Mubarak step down immediately, said that there were no new agreements or concessions.       

A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Nassar, said the huge and sometimes violent demonstrations that have paralyzed Cairo for 13 days, reverberating around the Middle East, would continue “until the political path can have a role in achieving the aspirations of the protesters” — an apparent reference to their goal of removing Mr. Mubarak.       

Mr. Nassar said mediators had brokered the encounter with Mr. Suleiman, who Saturday received public backing from the Obama administration and other Western governments that confirmed him as the West’s choice to guide any transfer of power.       

“The brothers decided to enter a round of dialogue to determine how serious the officials are achieving the demands of the people,” Mr. Nassar said. “The regime keeps saying we’re open to dialogue and the people are the ones refusing, so the Brotherhood decided to examine the situation from all different sides.”       

“The Egyptian regime is stubborn, and cannot relinquish power easily,” he said. “In politics, you must hear everyone’s opinions.”       

Another member of the Brotherhood, the former lawmaker Mohasen Rady, said the organization had not abandoned its demand for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster. “He can leave in any way the regime would accept him to leave, but it has to be that he is out,” he said.       

Other members of the Brotherhood described its presence at the talks on Sunday as exploratory rather than part of a full negotiation.       

On Sunday — the first day of the working week — Cairo seemed to be assuming some of the trappings of normalcy.       

Some banks reopened for several hours after a week of closures, with limits on withdrawals by customers who stood in line to access their accounts. The city’s notoriously rambunctious traffic began to rebuild across bridges over the Nile that had been access routes to Tahrir Square for pro-democracy protesters and their adversaries.       

Tens of thousands of protesters milled again in the square, which seemed to be taking on an air of semi-permanency with tents, food stalls, worship and music. Vendors offered dates. On the perimeters, a Bahrain airline office had reopened, as had a store called “Hana Eastern Gifts.”       

The numbers seemed initially to be slightly fewer than on Saturday. But as the day wore on thousands of people headed to the square, so that the city offered rival visions — one promoted by footage on state television of a capital returning to its normal ways; and another, in Tahrir Square, of continued defiance.       

Tanks remained in position on the square itself, and an overnight curfew was still technically in force. Reporters in the city said that foreigners risked being stopped at roadblocks and that some had been threatened with arrest as spies.       

Muslim and Coptic prayers resounded over the square. The show of interfaith harmony came just weeks after a suicide bomber killed at least 21 people as a New Year’s Eve Mass was ending in Alexandria. In the past, some members of the Coptic minority have accused their leaders of reluctance to confront the state.       

In an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” on Sunday, Mr. Suleiman repeated his insistence that Mr. Mubarak could not step down now. “We don’t want chaos in our country,” he said. If Mubarak would say I’m leaving now who would take over?”       

Mr. Suleiman, who is also in charge of Egyptian intelligence, said that under the Constitution the speaker of parliament would rule in the president’s absence, but he warned that “in this atmosphere the people who have their own agenda will make instability in our country.”       

He said he would not seek the presidency himself. “I became old now,” he said. “I did enough for this country,” he said, adding “when the president asked me to be vice president I accepted just to help the president in this critical time.”       

Asked who was behind the currents of political change sweeping across Tunisia, Yemen and much of the Middle East, he focused on Islamic extremism. It is “an Islamic current that pushes these people,” he said.       

Young people may be the face of protest, “but others are pushing them to do that,” adding that those spurs are coming from abroad.       

According to The Associated Press, footage on state television showed youthful supporters of a leading democracy advocate, Mohamed ElBaradei, and a number of smaller leftist, liberal group along with representatives of the Brotherhood meeting Mr. Suleiman.       

In an interview with CNN, Mr. ElBaradei said that he was not ready to negotiate with a representative of Mr. Mubarak, saying that his regime had lost credibility.       

Instead, Mr. ElBaradei called for a presidential council to serve during a year of transition as a caretaker government to prepare for elections and to take other steps.       

“We need to abolish the present constitution,” he said. “We need to dissolve the current parliament. These are all elements of the dictatorship regime, and we should not be — I don’t think we will go to democracy through the dictatorial constitution.”       

Rashid Mohammed Rashid, a former minister of trade and industry, said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he believed it would be better for Mr. Mubarak to finish his term as president to ensure a smooth transition.       

“I personally believe that he will push towards changes to be done, and it’s not easy,” Mr. Rashid said. “We all know it’s not easy, but I believe that the alternative is chaos and the alternative is just jumping into the unknown, and I believe that he has the will to do that.”       

Mr. Rashid also acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood was strong, but that the impetus for the street protests was initiated by Egypt’s youth who “were restricted despite the political reforms that have been happening of having a voice and a share.”       

“I believe that they will also be counterbalance to some of the few people who want to take extremist views, like the Muslim Brotherhood and others,” he added.       

Asked whether Mr. Mubarak was disappointed that President Obama had asked him to resign, Mr. Rashid said: “I think the position of President Obama, the position of the American government was extremely short-sighted, I don’t want even to say stupid. There was so much interference. They shouldn’t actually get involved in this.”       

The meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to reflect a wider regional acknowledgment of the its influence. On Thursday, King Abdullah II of Jordan, struggling to stave off growing public discontent, also met with his own country’s representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood for the first time in nearly a decade.       

The development came a day after American officials said Mr. Suleiman had promised them an “orderly transition” that would include constitutional reform and outreach to opposition groups.       

“That takes some time,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, speaking at a Munich security conference. “There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare.”       

Protesters interpreted the simultaneous moves by the Western leaders and Mr. Suleiman as a rebuff to their demands for an end to the dictatorship led for almost three decades by Mr. Mubarak, a pivotal American ally and pillar of the existing order in the Middle East.       

“What they are saying behind closed doors, they are backing Mubarak,” said Noha el-Shakawy, 52, a pharmacist with dual Egyptian and American citizenship. “We are nothing to them. The United States wants to sacrifice all of our lives, 85 million people.”       

Leaders of the Egyptian opposition and rank-and-file protesters had earlier rejected any negotiations with Mr. Suleiman until after the ouster of Mr. Mubarak, arguing that moving toward democracy will require ridding the country of not only its dictator but also his rubber-stamp Parliament and a Constitution designed for one-party rule.       

On Saturday, Mr. Mubarak’s party announced a shake-up that removed its old guard, including his son Gamal, from the party’s leadership while installing younger, more reform-minded figures. But such gestures were quickly dismissed as cosmetic by analysts and opposition figures.       

Mrs. Clinton’s message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and reinforced in a flurry of calls by President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Egyptian and regional leaders, appears to reflect an attempt at balancing calls for systemic change with some semblance of legal order and stability.       

Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Mubarak, having taken himself and Gamal out of the September elections, was already effectively sidelined. She emphasized the need for Egypt to reform its Constitution to make a vote credible. “That is what the government has said it is trying to do,” she said.       

She also stressed the dangers of holding elections without adequate preparation and highlighted fears about deteriorating security inside Egypt, noting an explosion at a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, and uncorroborated news reports of an earlier assassination attempt on Mr. Suleiman.       

In a statement, the Egyptian government said there had been no assassination attempt, but added that on Jan. 28 a car in Mr. Suleiman’s motorcade was struck by a bullet fired by “criminal elements.”       

Protesters noted that Western worries about security and orderly transitions sounded remarkably like Mr. Mubarak’s age-old excuses for postponing change. And they said they had waited long enough.       

“We don’t want Omar Suleiman to take Mubarak’s place. We are not O.K. with this regime at all,” said Omar el-Shawy, a young online activist. “We want a president who is a civilian.”