Always a joy to be in Manhattan, though the dollar is going to have to fall a lot more before it starts to feel like a bargain again. 

And despite years of experience, I still find the subway system deeply confusing.

But as my old chum Ed Heathcote of the Financial Times says, it’s a place where you just walk along with a big smile on your face. You’d have thought that there wouldn’t be anywhere left in Manhattan to gentrify, but you’d be wrong. There are still large run-down areas, some of them pretty central. This is why a low-budget arts organisation such as the New Museum can build a smart new building by SANAA – it’s in the Bowery, next to a down-and-outs hostel. And it’s that kind of juxtaposition that makes you smile. 

But as you’ll read in the April RIBAJ, I wasn’t over to sigh over picturesque dereliction, though I did a fair bit of that in my stroll along the High Line (see link below). I was there to catch up on Diller Scofidio and Renfro’s Alice Tully Hall makeover, the first big part of their mega-project to make the whole of Lincoln Center, well, a bit nicer and less fortress-like. 

Always interesting to see how previously fringe architects handle the transition to mainstream work. The former Future Systems springs to mind. And just as Amanda Levete made the dreams of the late Jan Kaplicky buildable, so you get the strong impression that Elizabeth Diller is the firm hand on the tiller here. 

Liz Diller and I have a running joke. When we meet, she says:  “You’re the guy who told me off.” To which I reply:  “No, Liz, you’re the architect who told ME off for standing in the wrong place in her building.” 

This goes back to when I visited D S + R’s first big, permanent built project, the harbourside Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. There’s a kind of flap underneath its huge aerial cantilever, housing a room full of computer screes, angled downwards with a huge picture window focusing on the murky waters of the harbour. And that’s the point of the design – you’re meant to see just the water, not the view.  I’d gone right to the front of the room, from where I could just make out the horizon. 

Liz Diller saw me there and upbraided me with the immortal words, “You’re standing in the wrong place.”  So – she told me off. But I reported this exchange with a metaphorically raised eyebrow, so she thinks I scolded her. This means we’re big scoldy pals now.

Anyway, back to Manhattan. The cleverness of DS+R is the way they have colonised Lincon Center almost by stealth. Where other architects have produced grandiose plans for the individual buildings, and got nowhere, D S +R have started from a relatively minor public space commission and gradually moved in from there and taken command. Hence Alice Tully Hall and the famed Juilliard school, right on Broadway. But the comment I most like came this time from Ricardo Scofidio when I asked him if there was any chance of their building in Briitain. They’d tried for the new American Embassy in London, he drily related, but were not corporate enough. But – that’s the way we like ‘em, over here. Uncorporate architects. It’s only a matter of time. While I was there, I dropped into the downtown office of Grimshaw, run by Andrew Whalley who is our “out there” columnist this month. I was expecting around 6 people: I found a bustling 60. So I took a picture of the office with its nice cast-iron corinthian columns, and then Andrew took me to a diner for lunch where I had the best steak sandwich ever. 

Oh, and read my account of a walk along Manhattan’s High Line linear park, shortly to open. www.hughpearman.com