One day soon, the chaotic jumble of cranes and empty lots that now make up much of the texture of New York City will give way to actual buildings, parks, and streets.

To make sure that this city of the future remains livable, the director of the Department of City Planning, Amanda Burden, has created a new division focusing on urban design within the department and named Alexandros Washburn, a former public works adviser to Senator Moynihan, as its first director.

“The success of every project comes down to the details,” Ms. Burden said. “It affects how the city feels on a grand level, all the way down to the pedestrian. Alex Washburn has a great eye and incredible experience for that.”

Mr. Washburn, 44, is charged with making sure the parks get the right amount of sun, buildings aren’t too bulky, and the skyline stays coherent. He will act as Ms. Burden’s eyes for the incredible number of projects now under way in the city.

He was previously a principal in W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, in Chelsea, and was president of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation, overseeing the conversion of the Eighth Avenue post office into Moynihan Station. While working under Moynihan, Mr. Washburn was the only staff architect in the Senate.

Ms. Burden’s selection of Mr. Washburn has been widely praised in architectural and advocacy circles.

“We don’t always agree with city planning, but we think Amanda deserves a lot of credit for persuading Alex to work with the city,” the president of the Municipal Arts Society, Kent Barwick, said. “Alex is an extremely talented architect and very savvy about cities.”

Mr. Washburn said he sees his current position as a continuation of his late mentor’s vision for the way cities can be.

“Senator Moynihan believed that good design is not just about aesthetics, but that the look of a city expresses the values of the people who live in it,” he said. “He wanted to prove people wrong who thought that cities were hopeless.”

Officials in the Bloomberg administration have said they believe good design is essential for the city to compete globally with such cities as Shanghai and Dubai. That success will be judged on what it feels like to live in and walk around the city.

“It’s really the citizen that will be the measure of our success,” Mr. Washburn said. “How do you make sure New York doesn’t become dull, but has the greatest streetscape with the greatest variety and the greatest texture? To keep everything vibrant and authentic with new projects is really tough. You have to calibrate everything very finely. Every time you change something in the city, you affect another constituency.”

Mr. Washburn’s and the Bloomberg administration’s degree of success in these calibrations will be apparent long after they are gone from the scene.

“Buildings in cities record very accurately for a long time to come not what we were pretending to do but what we were doing,” Mr. Washburn said. “What you build is what you are going to be remembered for.”