Lee Friedlander’s new photos confound the notion that an artist’s later work is diluted and less passionate than his earlier work.  The dozens of photos in “America by Car,” crammed into the small mezzanine galleries of the Whitney, are bristling with visual energy.

Taken over the past twelve years during road trips, they document views from the front seat of the photographer’s car.  The vehicle’s windows and doors appear in every shot, but instead of becoming a repetitive framing device they function dynamically, collapsing the huge, often sad space of the landscape onto the intimate interior architecture of the car.  Friedlander’s purposeful, eccentric views gives the familiar landscape a caustic intensity.  What this photographer sees is highly particular.

(Lee Friedlander, Arizona, 2007, from the series America by Car, 1995-2009.)

I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night.  They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge. 

Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister.  The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies inside are arrayed with a devastating, lifeless elegance.  There are half-gallon-size jars of codeine and sudafed, and boxes and boxes of prescription painkillers.  These are the things that keep us healthy. 

(Damien Hirst, The Existence of Nothing Causes Nothing, 1999.)

This Thursday artist Mary Ellen Carroll lifted and turned an unoccupied house in the Houston subdivision of Sharpstown 180 degrees.  The artist explained that the work, “Protoype 180,” was a commentary on the lack of a land use policy in the city, and on the fading glamor of this community.

Like many suburban communities Sharpstown was laid out in a way that’s purely picturesque, without regard for the land’s native landscape and orientation, so that turning the building 180 degrees doesn’t do much but replace the front street facade with another, less formal one.  At a time when so many single family houses are being foreclosed on the effort seems especially hollow.  Taking the building to somewhere where it was needed would have been a more radical gesture.

Last night at a SoHo showroom Kansas-based architect Dan Rockhill spoke about his work.  He has two professional lives, one at an eponymous firm and another with the non-profit Studio 804.  His role at Studio 804 is a lot like the late Samuel Mockbee’s at Rural Studio.  Each semester he leads University of Kansas architecture students to design and construct a local building.

Rockhill’s projects, which are driven by green issues and a concern for craft, have an understated sensibility.  He called it a “chicken coop mentality” because they follow the most basic assumptions about building orientation, layout and construction.  Yet each of Rockhill’s structures is elegant and modern-feeling, like a box for living.  That might be the hardest thing about green architecture, making it beautiful too.