The Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street is a great space to begin with.  Like many Chelsea galleries, which are converted warehouses and garages, it’s a broad, clean space.  But the Gagosian is twice the size of neighboring galleries and, when properly choreographed, a fantastic backdrop for contemporary art.  I saw Damien Hirst’s first New York show there, dazzled by the formaldehyde tanks holding a shark and (in transverse slices) a cow.  And I saw Richard Serra’s 2003 show there, thunderstruck by the grandeur of the immense, curved steel forms.

The current exhibit of painter Rudolf Stingel’s work is a similar kind of knock-out.  Not the art, mind you, but the exhibit.  Stingel’s paintings, all super-sized, aren’t memorable but they have richly textures surfaces.  The large entrance gallery, which features three portraits on three separate walls, is boldly unnerving.  The largest gallery, which contains seven gold color-field canvases, has a lyrical, romantic feeling.  And passing through the narrow back gallery lined with silver carpet paintings feels like a giddy, Pop Art daydream.  Say what you will about their curatorial efforts; the people over at the Gagosian know how to put on a show.

Rachel Whiteread’s show at Luhring Augustine is made up of smaller pieces: plaster and resin castings of doors, windows, and aluminum soda cans.  They don’t have the same resonance that her larger works, architectural-like constructions that implicate the scale of the human figure, do.  But each has an indelible object-quality.  Whiteread has taken things that ordinarily rest at the edge of our attention and recast them as discrete, important objects.

The objects are quietly seductive.  The translucent, candy-colored resin pieces, which capture light prettily, draw attention to their own imperfections (air bubbles in the medium, impurities in the formwork, surface imprints of the release agent) and, in effect, their materiality.  In photographs Whiteread’s work has the seductive gleam of minimal art, and falls easily into abstraction.  But these pieces, when seen from up close, aren’t minimal at all.  It’s not their obvious referentiality that complicate matters, but their physical particularities.

What’s the difference between a townhouse and a row house, and does it really matter?  Both types of homes are fitted between high side walls and offer slender, discrete facades to the street.  But “townhouse” conjures images of well-heeled urban living, with all the attendant pretensions, while “row house” implies something altogether less formal and prepossessing.

A visited a friend who lives in a three-story brick row house near Frederick Douglass Square in Boston, and now I’m convinced that it’s the best kind of house.  A row house balances the privacy and freedom of a detached house with the security of an apartment.  It grants an inveterate urbanite his own street entrance, rooftop and yard, while keeping him connected to neighbors and the city.  And the spread of space inside, a straight shot through from sidewalk to back yard, offers both compressed urban energy and a sense of suburban ease.

Guy de Maupassant claimed that his favorite spot in Paris was the Eiffel Tower, because it was the only place in Paris from which one couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower.  I. M. Pei’s Hancock Tower in Boston from 1976 has a similar, singular presence in the city.  It’s visible from everywhere: downtown, the Fenway, the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the Commons and Copley Square.  It has no real challengers as the city’s tallest structure.  And when seen from more than a block away it feels, like the Tor, thoroughly un-building like, an apparition more than a construction.

The Tower is a fine, abstract countertpart to its more muscular neighbors, Trinity Church and the Public Library.  Its tapered footprint gives it a mysterious, mutable presence, so that it takes on different guises when seen from different places.  And its cool, bluish glass catches reflections that dissolve its figure.  It’s presence is angelic, floating protectively over everything.