Finalist: Michael J. Lewis of The Wall Street Journal

The building was made possible when new zoning rules were proposed for East Midtown, as the 73-block area around Grand Central Terminal is designated. Concerned about the lack of new construction (the average age of its office buildings was 70 years), the Department of City Planning relaxed its rules, permitting buildings of much greater density. In exchange, these buildings would need to offer a certain amount of public space, including sidewalks wider than the stingy 12-foot standard of the neighborhood. The rules were adopted in 2017, and the next year JPMorgan announced that it would replace the Union Carbide building with a skyscraper almost twice as tall.

Seen from the street, 270 Park first makes an impression of immense, turbulent energy. It does not so much ascend as jolt out of the ground, as if from some subterranean launching pad. Its walls tilt alarmingly outward, restrained by mammoth metal girders that spread out fanlike to hoist the building 80 feet into the air, after which it begins its sheer vertical rise. The recessed ground story lets the sidewalk widen into a plaza, in defiance of the commercial logic of New York that insists every business building advance right up to the property line.

The structural acrobatics were necessary to sidestep the rail lines directly below, but the dynamic form they take is characteristic of the architects, Foster + Partners, whose structurally expressive buildings helped launch the High Tech movement in architecture. All the hallmarks of their work are present: the steel exoskeleton, the emphasis on the diagonal beams, and the tense dialogue between force and weight. Such industrial exhibitionism is unusual today, when glass curtain walls typically conceal the working parts of the building, making them resemble a house of mirrored cards. But Norman Foster, the firm’s founder, treats a mighty beam under visible tension as a joyous thing, like a beautiful naked athlete.

And the athleticism continues upward. The building steps in sharply four times as it rises, with a rectilinear angularity that suggests a tapered tower of dominos. If the shape is strikingly contemporary, it is also strangely familiar, recalling New York’s distinctive setback skyscrapers, those Art Deco ziggurats of the 1920s and ’30s.

The radically new and the radically traditional come together even more thrillingly the moment you step into the Park Avenue lobby. A vast and lofty hall runs 290 feet, all the way through the building to Madison Avenue. It is flanked to either side by the V-shaped beams of the steel truss, clad in bronze, giving all the dignity of pylons along an ancient ceremonial passage. The sense of processional movement is enhanced by a broad and graceful stair, a form that Mr. Foster said, in the course of a tour of the building, was part of the historic language of bank architecture. The center of the axis is marked by a pole bearing the American flag, waving in artfully supplied wind.

Skyscrapers may soar but their interiors rarely do. After all, they are fungible real estate. But 270 Park gives us the rare lobby whose scale and aspiration match the building’s presence on the skyline. Visitors, alas, cannot pass the security barrier without clearance, but they may advance far enough to experience the spatial splendor, and to admire the two large-scale paintings by Gerhard Richter that flank the central passage. It rivals the city’s finest lobbies, even that of the Woolworth Building. Go and see it.

A similar generosity with space prevails throughout the building, but not for reasons of conspicuous consumption. Mr. Foster spoke passionately of the imperatives of health and well-being in an office building, and the role of fresh air and light. The building’s employees, who will ultimately number 10,000, get twice the amount of air and 30% more daylight than those in typical New York offices. The ceilings are accordingly high, and the windows startlingly huge, which explains why 270 Park contains 60 stories, while the Empire State Building, a significantly shorter building, manages to squeeze in 102. Even with its high ceilings, the building opens up its interior further with double-height spaces around its eight trading floors. Most extravagant is the triple-height sky lobby at the 14th floor, which has all the happy hubbub of the market square of a small town.

There is no reason that a High Tech architect cannot also be a humanist. In even the building’s smallest details, there is a sensitive concern for the human experience. For example, in the subtle arrangement of the external steps, which are not the usual blocky affairs but curve at their corners. People approach buildings obliquely, not head on, Mr. Foster noted, as in the great buildings of antiquity. I asked him where he learned this and he spoke of the triad of mentors who taught him when he came to Yale in the early 1960s, each of whom represented one quality: Paul Rudolph (“practicality”), Serge Chermayeff (“ideas”) and Vincent Scully (“history”).

In choosing Mr. Foster as their architect, JPMorgan Chase determined to make a commercial tower that is also a civic building, that opens itself up to the street, that respects the architectural culture of the city, and that treats its inhabitants with respect. It affirms the value of city life, a remarkable feat in a building designed during the Covid years, when working remotely seemed to be the future. 

Norman Foster, now age 90, is perhaps the only living architect to have watched Nazi bombs falling on his hometown. He witnessed the Christmas bombings of 1940 that ravaged Manchester, England. The next day he picked up stray shards of shrapnel, his first tactile encounter with our High Tech world. A child of the Blitz, he grew up fascinated by technology but always aware of its human dimension. He has now given his clients, and the city they inhabit, that rarest rara avis, a civilized skyscraper.

There is much to like about the new Princeton University Art Museum. It is a serious building, aspiring to be worthy of the collection it houses. It does not strain for novelty or make attention-seeking gestures. Nor does it try to compete with its contemporary peers. Its frame of reference runs deeper, and it looks for inspiration in such modernist masterpieces as I.M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art and Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art. It has been labeled, not altogether favorably, Brutalist, which has become a vogue word in recent years, but that is not quite right. It represents what might be called an Establishment Modernism, befitting a confident institution secure in its sense of self.

The museum needed to be much larger than its predecessor: Mr. Adjaye, working in conjunction with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, designed a 146,000-square-foot building to replace a museum that was half its size. To keep it from dwarfing its 19th-century neighbors, he broke up its mass into separate blocky pavilions. One was already in place—the Marquand Library, Princeton’s distinguished 500,000-volume repository of art history—and could not be moved. Nor could it be integrated into the circulation system of the museum, the two institutions having different security needs. (To go from one to the other will let you enjoy the weather.)

Leaving the library as the center of the museum’s north side, Mr. Adjaye made eight other slightly smaller pavilions, which he grouped in the form of a slightly disheveled tic-tac-toe board. Except for one that is reserved for a conservation studio, they house the second-floor galleries, and project forward over the public spaces of the first floor, which include a gift shop, study rooms and an auditorium.

The museum is clad in gray precast concrete panels, slightly angled from the wall in a way that suggests pleating. Their beveled corners are polished to a high glossy sheen, which creates slender vertical stripes that contrast sharply with the charcoal shadows from which they emerge. All this helps relieve the museum’s windowless solemnity. Nonetheless, it is a very grave building.

Princeton, N.J.

When one of America’s great universities sets out to build a new art museum, we expect much. Faults that might be excused in the work of a less seasoned designer, or a less prosperous institution, weigh heavier on an architect of the stature of David Adjaye and a university as venerable as Princeton. Candor, the critic’s mark of respect, is called for.

It is curious how an institution that is part of a lively society of museums strenuously refuses to use the word museum. But all of its neighbors, to varying degrees, are monumental in character and sit weightily on the ground. And this did not seem to be the best image for the creator of the mobile, whose greatest achievement was to liberate sculpture from the earth.

Such seem to have been the thoughts of Jacques Herzog, of the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron known for creating London’s Tate Modern, who was engaged by the Calder Foundation in 2019. A Calder museum had already been planned for the site by Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect known for his poetic minimalism. His project, which envisioned an abstract colonnade that would have reflected the classical language of the Parkway, was abandoned in 2005.

As if reluctant to compete with Calder on formal terms, Mr. Herzog chose to reduce the architectural presence to take up as little of the 1.8 acre site as possible. He buried most of his 18,000-square-foot museum (which is what it is) under a garden designed by the Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf. The result is a maximum of space with a minimum of building.

As fate would have it, we have a detailed record of the evolution of the project. Mr. Herzog began work in 2020, during the loneliest months of the Covid-19 pandemic, toiling in isolation and making highly personal sketches. Published as “Calder Gardens: Drawings and Texts by Jacques Herzog,” they show how he began by thinking in terms of fragments, little slivers of space in which the sculpture would act as if on stage. The sense of fragmented experience carried over into his plan, which never resolved itself into a strong spatial order but is loose and episodic.

Since the nearby Barnes Foundation provides most of the administrative services, the building could devote a full two-thirds of its space to exhibition galleries. Above ground it is a low-slung angular wisp of an object, whose cladding in mirrored steel deprives it of any sense of form or substance. It is the architectural equivalent of a stealth airplane, meant to fly undetected—not so much a building as an anti-building. But this is mere preamble to the galleries below.

The staircase is quirky. It first leads down a narrow passage only to expand unexpectedly to the left into a kind of faux theater, whose “seats” are built-in benches running from the stair to the opposite wall, each one twice the height of a single step. But for anyone sitting in the upper rows there is nothing to see but a blank wall descending from the ceiling and stopping about halfway. Only on the lower ones can you glimpse what lies beyond.

In 1931 Ted Shawn, the pioneer of American modern dance, bought 150 acres here to create a summer dance colony. Eleven years later he built a theater, “the first performance space in America designed specifically for dance,” as Jacob’s Pillow proudly notes. Its form came from the barns on the site: a post-and-beam frame, sided in wood and capped by a gable. This rural New England vernacular set the standard for the buildings that followed, including the original Doris Duke Theatre, yet another exalted barn, which burned down five years ago.

The new Doris Duke Theatre, which opened July 9, is decidedly not a barn. Designed by Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo, who is also responsible for Manhattan’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, a branch of the New York Public Library, it is unmistakably a work of contemporary architecture, a radical departure for Jacob’s Pillow. As such, it must be judged not only on how successfully it performs its programmatic duties but also on its implications for the character of the campus. In other words, is it a good neighbor?

In functional terms, the new theater is a triumph. The building it replaces was not a traditional proscenium theater but a flexible studio space, which befitted its function as an incubator for experimental dance projects. Its successor serves the same function, and while “experimental” today implies technology, it is not an ostentatiously high-tech building. Though it offers the choreographer the widest array of current innovations—according to the press release, everything “from streaming to motion-capture, coding with AI in robotics to immersive digital art”—its character is warm and personal.

The auditorium is a lofty open space, measuring 122.5 by 50 feet, with no formal axis. Instead, its movable seats can be arranged in various configurations, and dancers can emerge as needed from any of its four sides. Special care was taken to ensure that the whole body of the dancer always be visible.

Visible and also audible. The floor, walls, even the undersides of the catwalks above, are all of wood, giving a pleasing resonance to the space, like the sounding board of a piano. You feel and hear the vibration of the dancers’ bodies, engaging you at a kinetic level with the performance without the distancing effect of a proscenium. It is intimate in the best way, although the intimacy can be thrillingly overthrown in an instant when one of the sliding doors of the space is flung aside to reveal the Berkshire forests beyond.

For the theater’s lead designer, this performance space was a “magic box,” rising up to tower over its apparatus of lobbies, restrooms and so forth, which huddle around its base. The flat-roofed volume, blocky and monumental, forms the strongest possible contrast with these supporting rooms, which form a kind of free-swinging, sinuous skirt around the torso of the auditorium. The effect is stirring: a high-decked galleon upon a timber sea.

Rather than deferring to the barn aesthetic of Jacob’s Pillow, the new theater offers an abstraction of it. Like the older buildings, it is built of unpainted wood, although in modern mass timber construction. It is assembled from sections of lumber glued at right angles to one another, its cross lamination giving it remarkable stiffness. Instead of siding applied to a post-and-beam frame—skin and bones, as it were—its walls form a continuous exoskeleton. The outermost layer of lumber is varied in texture, alternately smooth or corrugated, forming attractively variegated bands across the surfaces.

Ms. Houben spoke to me about the important role of “verandas” in her theater. Of course the humble porch—that indispensable adaptation to the American summer—is something we take for granted. It is not a feature of European architecture. But sometimes the outsider can spot possibilities that the insider, constrained by convention, does not. Ms. Houben’s veranda, a roofed passage that traces a half circle around the theater perimeter, is not merely a shelter, passageway and place of gathering, but a playful image of dance itself, rendered in terms of architecture. A festival theater, she said, should not be “too serious.”

Mecanoo is not a flashy firm; nor is Marvel, the firm that designed the Northeast Bronx YMCA and which served here as the architects of record. Their work shares an abiding concern with the human experience of a building, rather than the cultivation of an eye-catching “signature style.” Marvel worked with Jeffrey Gibson, the Cherokee/Choctaw artist, to design the landscape in accordance with what Jacob’s Pillow describes as “indigenous values.” Out of their collaboration came a medicinal herbal garden and fire pit, features you can admire while also wondering if the theater really needed them.

As I left the parking lot, I had to brake for four frisky bear cubs. While I waited for them to tumble their way back into the woods, as inspiring as any dance I’ve seen, it occurred to me that perhaps Jacob’s Pillow already has the best landscape design anyone could ask for.

The Davis Center, which now replaces the Lasker, rests on entirely different assumptions.  It regards the park as a work of landscape art, whose natural topography should dictate its architecture. It does not seek to impose on that topography, but to defer to it so completely that any building would be indivisible from it. If the outcome is unusually happy, it is because of an unusually happy collaboration between the clients and their designers. 

The prime mover of the Davis Center is the Central Park Conservancy, the private nonprofit organization formed in 1980 to help the city manage a park that it could no longer afford to maintain. During its early decades, the Conservancy did comparatively little at the north end of the park, but in 2017 it engaged Susan T. Rodriguez as design architect and Christopher Nolan as landscape architect, and asked them to make studies for replacing the Lasker Rink. John Doherty was later engaged as executive architect. Ground was broken in late 2021 for the $160 million project, of which the Conservancy raised $100 million, the remainder coming from the city. The completed project opens April 26.

While the Lasker was used for just half the year, the Davis Center is a facility for every season: a skating rink in winter, a swimming pool in summer, and a public green for the rest of the year. Its centerpiece is its oval-shaped pool, which measures 120 by 285 feet (much longer than the 164 feet of an Olympic pool). The form comes from the ravine in which it sits, the most visible sign that it is the terrain that governs the design of the Davis Center.

Ms. Rodriguez’s building is so artfully designed that it barely seems like a building at all. A 34,000-square-foot, green-roofed structure containing lockers, restrooms and water-treatment equipment, it reads from the pool as little more than an enclosed porch. Ms. Rodriguez calls this the “gathering space,” which maximizes views of the pool and lets parents keep an eye on their children. Along its rear wall a slender skylight cuts through the green roof above, ensuring that the changing rooms are never more than a few steps from daylight. Separating these private inner rooms from the outer public space is a continuous curved passage, lined with ceramic tile of a strikingly deep emerald green. Even here, bermed into the earth, everything feels light and airy, with no suggestion of the subterranean.

There is little in the way of visible architecture, apart from the stone retaining walls on either side of the gathering space. This is in keeping with Mr. Nolan’s conviction that the proportion of landscape to hardscape had to be increased. He has succeeded admirably, reversing the Lasker’s ratio of 60% hardscape to 40% landscape. Most strikingly, he has reopened the watercourse that flows from the ravine to the Harlem Meer, and which long ago had been buried in an underground culvert.

Equally successful is Mr. Nolan’s treatment of the landscape beyond the pool, the rocky outcrops that represent some of Central Park’s wildest terrain. This area, described by a critic in 1860 as mere “rock, ravine and swamp, comparatively worthless,” was not included in the park’s original plan of 1858, which ended at 106th Street. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted were far more concerned with the ceremonial public face to the south, with their graceful public choreography of carriage drives and footpaths.

But at the last minute they recognized a topographic feature concealed by the geometry of the Manhattan street grid. At 110th Street, the topography abruptly fell some 50 feet to the Harlem plains, and the rocky outcrop above was a promontory whose views extended from the Palisades to Long Island to Staten Island. Had the park ended as planned, at 106th Street, a line of buildings would eventually have closed those views forever. The next four blocks, hastily added to the Vaux and Olmsted plan, gave the park the most satisfying northern end possible, one determined by the natural topography itself, and not the accidental line of the street grid. Seldom has an afterthought been so felicitous.

Yet all this was long forgotten when the hardscape-heavy Lasker was dropped on the site. Now, with the new Davis Center, the north end of Central Park regains its place as an essential part of the Vaux and Olmsted design. It reminds us that they won that commission by sinking the required transverse roads out of sight, so that the visitor experienced the park as a visual continuity. Ms. Rodriguez and Mr. Nolan have done something that is far better than simply giving us an attractive building. They have taken a wounded and forsaken landscape and healed it.

The Frick has long wanted to open the whole of Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion to the public but hesitated to evict the administrative staff from its comfortable second-story nests. This was but one item on the ever-growing institutional wish list, which included a public auditorium, a café, special exhibition galleries, and much more—none of which could be easily fitted onto the Frick’s cramped site. With most of its footprint taken up by the original mansion and the nine-story library wing on 71st Street, the only speck of open space remaining was the elegant pool and garden on 70th Street. In 2014, the Frick proposed to replace them with a six-story building, an idea that aroused so much opposition that it was forced to scrap the plan and start over.

Out of the debacle came an inspiring idea: perhaps a series of judicious, small-scale interventions might achieve what a major addition could not. In 2016 Selldorf Architects was engaged as design architect, with Beyer Blinder Belle later signing on as executive architect. On April 17 their remodeled museum reopens, having cost $330 million (much of which was spent on temporarily moving the collection to the former Whitney Museum).

Ms. Selldorf has previously shown a high degree of imagination and sensitivity when remodeling museum buildings—including, less than a mile north, the Neue Galerie. Here she had to work with tweezers, so to speak. Space had to be won grudgingly, a room at a time, either by modest additions or by reconfiguring existing space. The storage vaults beneath the 70th Street garden gave way to a 218-seat auditorium, a gem of a space with hand-finished plaster walls and marvelous acoustics. Curiously shaped, it is a German Expressionist’s dream of the inside of an egg. Meanwhile the circular music room was sacrificed in favor of three new galleries for temporary exhibitions. Above these, two stories were added to accommodate the administrative offices and an unusually cheerful conservation studio. In all, only 27,000 square feet of new construction were added, not all that much in relation to what had been a 178,000-square-foot complex.

It is one thing to create new spaces and quite another to make them work together smoothly. The Frick had grown incrementally, acquiring properties to the east as it expanded, without any comprehensive plan. This made for comically awkward circulation. Members of the public who wanted to go from the museum to the library were told to go outside and walk around the block. Staff members could thread their way through the circuitous labyrinth of the basement.

Less absurd but still cumbersome was the plan of the Frick mansion itself. Arriving and departing groups jostled in the bottleneck of the reception hall, which was clogged with the ticketing, information and coat-check desks. But such was to be expected in a building that Thomas Hastings had designed in 1913 as a private house, never meant for the surge of crowds. 

Ms. Selldorf addressed this with an adroit feat of spatial legerdemain. Reconfiguring the stately reception hall of 1977, she turned what had been a cul-de-sac into a lively intersection. A passage at the rear now lets you go to the library without a stroll around the block. Meanwhile, an inviting open stair lifts you above the tumult of the entrance and presents you with multiple attractions: a café to the east, special exhibition galleries to the north, and entrance to the second story of the Frick to the west. The stair, and its nearby elevators, connect all levels of the museum, and for the first time the Frick has a circulation system that matches the elegant clarity of its classical facades.

None of this is visible from the exterior, which shows only one significant change, the southward extension of the entire library tower. At every level it accommodates new functions, most notably the new café on the second floor, which looks down pleasantly onto the 70th Street garden and pool. The extension is a lofty but skinny slab—about 110 feet high yet just 22 feet deep, the proportions of a Pop-Tart—and its most remarkable feature is its restraint. Concerned that the massive stone cliff not overwhelm the domestic scale of the original mansion, the architects treated its facade as simply as possible, an essay in stripped classicism that relies on the rhythm and proportion of the windows rather than ornamental detail for its effect. It is a decided improvement over the strictly utilitarian facade it replaces.

In this, and elsewhere in the remodeled Frick, we find a quality that is in short supply in contemporary architecture: humility. All this, and on a site shackled with enough constraints to have challenged Houdini.