Robert Moses

''Those who can, build,'' Mr. Moses once said. ''Those who can't, criticize.'' Robert Moses was, in every sense of the word, New York's master builder. Neither an architect, a planner, a lawyer nor even, in the strictest sense, a politician, he changed the face of the state more than anyone who was. Before him, there was no Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach State Park, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, West Side Highway or Long Island parkway system or Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects. He built all of these and more.

Before Mr. Moses, New York State had a modest amount of parkland; when he left his position as chief of the state park system, the state had 2,567,256 acres. He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges.

His guiding hand made New York, known as a city of mass transit, also the nation's first city for the automobile age. Under Mr. Moses, the metropolitan area came to have more highway miles than Los Angeles does; Moses projects anticipated such later automobile-oriented efforts as the Los Angeles freeway system.

But where Los Angeles grew up around its highways, Mr. Moses thrust many of New York's great ribbons of concrete across an older and largely settled urban landscape, altering it drastically. He further changed the landscape with rows of red-brick apartment towers for low- and middle-income residents, asphalt playgrounds and huge sports stadiums.

The Moses vision of New York was less one of neighborhoods and brownstones than one of soaring towers, open parks, highways and beaches - not the sidewalks of New York but the American dream of the open road.

Throughout his career he pointed with pride to his ability to ''get things done.'' It was an ability no one questioned; nonetheless Mr. Moses was a controversial figure, especially in the later years of his public career. He was far more agile at behind-the-scenes maneuvering than he was at public politicking.

In his one try for elective office, his race for Governor on the Republican ticket in 1934, he was defeated by 800,000 votes, the largest margin in New York State history. After the debacle, his administrative power continued unabated, but he never again considered running for office.

Mr. Moses was close to a number of city, state and Federal Government officials. But with the exception of Gov. Alfred E. Smith, to whom he owed much of his early power, he seemed, to many observers, to be less in debt to governors, mayors and even Presidents than they appeared to be to him. His era of power had begun long before the election of many of the chief executives for whom he worked, and it continued long after many of them had passed from public view.

Critics were later to question whether Mr. Moses' biases were a cause or an effect of the automobile age, but it is certain that he focused his public-works projects on increasing suburbanization and use of the automobile. He was largely responsible for the network of parkways on Long Island, for example, as well as for highways within the city that were conceived more for the convenience of suburban automobile owners than inner-city residents.

Like many planners in the 1930's and 1940's, Mr. Moses did not question, as later planners did, the ultimate effect the automobile would have on the city, choking old streets with traffic and leading to the demolition of many neighborhoods to make way for expressways. Mr. Moses believed simply, as he stated in his 1974 rebuttal to the Caro biography, that ''we live in a motorized civilization.'' He saw the automobile as a force that was bound to revolutionize the landscape, and he intended to help guide that process.