Long ago, through a uniquely personal mix of bravado and dim-wittedness, I ended up on the East side of Manhattan in a snowstorm with a single subway token to get me to the Upper West side. A bit uncertain about the subway routes in that part of town, I thought I would hoof it, well, slip and slide it, to Grand Central and navigate to the Upper West apartment in which I was staying. It was a spectacular trip, filled with the full panoply of that city in its 1970s’ nadir: the elegant and the depraved navigating a mix of dog shit, slush and snow flurries.

I have never been all that comfortable on ice and my progress was like a slow and inebriated jig, my gaze flitting between the theatre around me and the hazards below. If each city block was an act in the city’s greater melodrama, there was a sublime moment on East 43rd during which firemen abandoned their gridlocked ladder truck, running ahead to bounce cars, complete with occupants, out of the way, the siren wailing a soundtrack and my fellow pedestrians a Greek chorus of advice, commentary and gallows humour.

As the fire truck made its staccato way west, I looked around and found a world, well, a pavement, transformed: no snow, no ice, no excrement. Behind me was the source of such benevolence, the Ford Foundation Building, from whose verdant atrium heating cables snaked out under the pavement. It was, and remains, the sublime 1967 Kevin Roche-designed headquarters for an organisation founded by Henry and Edsel Ford in 1936, separated from the Ford Motor Company since 1974 and committed to a robust funding of worldwide social equity programmes.

The building is almost cube-like, 12 storeys high, with a terraced garden occupying about two-thirds of the site falling a storey across a city block, a through-site link and gentle respite from the world beyond the glass façade. The working areas take up the northern and western sides, private towers reaching to the glazed sawtooth roof, overlooking the garden below and connected by two storeys of offices around the southern and western sides, seemingly suspended from the roof high above the trees below. It is a beautiful piece of work with exquisite Corten and concrete detailing, a building that breathes the immense power of a well-founded organisation with a clear sense of its own purpose.

I revisited the building a few weeks back. It was recently reopened after a refit that apparently addressed various code and maintenance issues and, though my memory of that stormy night was a bit hazy, the building offered that same combination of gentle respite and brute confidence that I recalled. Next morning, I visited the Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. It was an altogether different experience. A chalkboard welcome invited me up six storeys to an acre of tomatoes, lettuces, onions, bees and chickens, and a small gang of beatific urban farmers.

A fellow visitor’s inverted, periscope-like attachment to his cellphone kept my focus down at plant-top level at first and it seemed very familiar, the mix of recycled plastic buckets filled with, well, as a city boy, I don’t know what, irrigation tubing, and other paraphernalia presumably indispensable to the urban agronomist. But, when I raised my eyes, the pathway that bisected the neatly arrayed beds of produce aligned with the Chrysler building, a mile or two away across the East River and the low parapet wall enclosing the garden gave onto a 360-degree panorama: a thousand roofs waiting to sprout.

It seems in those two days I saw two variants of the ways in which the plethora of environmental and social problems we face are being addressed, albeit within the milieu of a country more comfortable with private initiatives than with appeals to government intervention. The Ford Foundation’s genesis within that quintessential 20th-century business – the privatising of mass transportation through the harnessing of industrialised labour – has given it huge wealth from which to fund its investments in activities around the world, where the foundation assessed it can achieve the greatest gains in social equity for the dollar spent.

At its best, this seems the most laudable cycling of significant resources to effect worthwhile social goals, aided and abetted by a US tax system predicated on facilitating private involvement in activities that we, in Aotearoa, feel are the natural domain of government.

On that Brooklyn rooftop, I felt a more practical strain, of rolling up one’s sleeves and homesteading on the urban prairie, living a wholesome life in a city not generally known for it, and making a buck supplying the local cafés and restaurants. The enterprise is commercially founded but the farmers pride themselves on doing their bit for climate change, too, through modification of the urban heat sink and community-building in offering a direct connection to the production of food.

It is unlikely, too, that those mulching, weeding and potting out next to the chook run and the beehives will be tainted by the opaque nature of private foundations. No matter how worthy or benevolent the headline grants are, the activities of wealthy agencies in foreign countries inevitably attract suspicion, if not outright evidence, of political manipulation; the Ford Foundation’s role in the overthrow of the liberal Chilean Allende government is a case in point.

The occupation of the rooftop and its rather ad hoc conversion to productive use seemed to hark back to a time of direct action when a combination of insouciant optimism, hard graft and soft drugs proposed a new way of doing things. Not for these guys the trainloads of processed food. Just lay out some membrane sheeting, lift a few tonnes of soil up, paint a Rousseau-like mural on the water tower and you’re in business: a repurposed building, a cooler neighbourhood and organic carrots.

It felt wonderfully optimistic again; why can’t we all do this? Having a reservoir of massively built warehouses in the borough helps but, rather than the specifics of the construction, it was the sheer optimism of seizing the day, of taking a system and stuffing about with it: in this case, reconfiguring a small part of a highly commercialised food chain.

In contrast, that great beautiful edifice across the river houses an institution with a massive reach and the financial leverage to effect societal reconfigurations on a grand scale. It, too, seeks to disrupt old orders in pursuit of a more equitable world, just one in which the actions are precipitated by a cadre of calm, besuited bureaucrats rather those in gumboots, T-shirts and blue jeans.

It is too much to suggest anything more than a happy fit of philosophy and architecture in the two realms but, as I sunned myself between the rows of basil plants, I felt that both sides of the river offered a sort of paradigm for our own actions in confronting the world: that we might act immediately and directly where we can, reoccupying, reusing and reconfiguring. Our collective well-being, though, even survival, now relies on each of us acting both locally and globally.

We architects must have regard for the reach of our own endeavours, recognising that the making of spaces offering calm and civility, be it on a rooftop or deep in the city grid, has the power to facilitate the best aspirations of human activity.

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine. Subscribe here