The Five Best Paintings*

(Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (Schutz; Murray); Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum (Basquiat); Courtesy of Bellwether Gallery (CVIjanovic); Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery (Tuymans))

Dana Schutz’s Presentation, from “Greater NY” (now at MoMA), left.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Boxer), from the Brooklyn Museum’s “Basquiat,” top middle.

Elizabeth Murray’s Do the Dance, from her MoMA retrospective, top right.

Luc Tuymans’s The Secretary of State, at David Zwirner, bottom middle.

Adam Cvijanovic’s Love Poem, Ten Minutes After the End of Gravity, at Bellwether this fall, bottom right.

*from this year’s shows

The Five Best New Buildings

The city’s five best new buildings have some things in common. None is in the familiar fillet neighborhoods of Manhattan—most were built along one two-mile stretch of the West Side waterfront, and the others are in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Four out of five are all about glass, and the same four were designed by New Yorkers. None is large. But they are also quite different, ranging from an evanescent exhibition space built for $80 a square foot to institutional buildings ($300 and $400 a square foot) to hyperluxurious condos ($4,000 a square foot). And the architects run the gamut as well, from little-known yeoman to mainstreaming avant-gardist to bona fide name brand.

(Photo: Robert Benson/Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

The Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections at the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx, by Mitchell-Giurgola. High-tech Victoriana—two greenhouses containing eight computer-controlled “growing zones.” The public is allowed inside only one section, but the view from outside at dusk is splendid.

(Photo: Courtesy of William Nicholas Bodouva Associates)

The West Midtown Ferry Terminal, Pier 79, by William Nicholas Bodouva. The city is the client, a former Port Authority architect is the designer—and this elegant, sui generis thing results? From the West Side Highway you see a pair of clear-glass bookends on each side of the old Art Deco Lincoln Tunnel ventilation towers—but the glass loops around on the river side as well, enclosing a café and waiting area for six new ferry slips.

(Photo: Courtesy of Think Tank New York/Steven Holl)

Higgins Hall Center Section, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, by Steven Holl. For once, a “deconstructivist” gesture makes beautiful sense, functionally and poetically: Because the new structure needed to connect two nineteenth-century buildings whose floor plates don’t match, the asymmetry was expressed on the exterior and turned into lively multilevel studio space inside. (Disclosure: I’m a Pratt Institute trustee.)

(Photo: Courtesy of DBox/Richard Meier and Partners)

165 Charles Street, by Richard Meier. The third and largest and sleekest of Meier’s three modernist condo jewel boxes on the West Side Highway. The profligacy ($20 million townhouse-size duplex penthouse, 55-foot swimming pool, 35-seat screening room) is almost enough to ruin the pleasure of ogling it.

(Photo: Gregory Colbert/Courtesy of Ashes and Snow)

The Nomadic Museum, Pier 54, by Shigeru Ban. Constructed from shipping containers, two-foot-thick paper tubes, and a 40-foot curtain made from a million tea bags to contain one photographer’s wildlife pictures, it was simply awesome. And it existed in New York only for the spring.
—Kurt Andersen