On a sunny afternoon, accompanied by a very, very fashionable friend, I walked the just-opened leg of the High Line, which stretches from 20th Street to 30th Street west of Tenth Avenue.  We roamed about a bit and then found a bench, kicked back, and enjoyed the better-than-any-movie display of humanity parading by.  It struck me that this was a quintessentially nineteenth-century pursuit, a lot like visiting one of the great European glass-covered shopping arcades.

One could argue that the notion of the arcade, and also of the flaneur, are quintessentially French.  But the arcade I remember best is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which is home to, among other businesses, the first Prada store.  But an arcade isn’t really about shopping.  It’s about dressing, strolling, gathering, watching, and wandering.  It’s a deeply pleasurable urban experience that unfolds, in some form, on every sidewalk in every city in the world.  The designers of the High Line have, rather brilliantly, given us an arcade in the shape of a park, without steel and glass, and without shops.

Michelle Obama made waves this week wearing a floor-length white column gown by Naeem Khan to a state dinner for Germany.  She looked almost as spectacular as she did in the shimmering gold strapless Naeem Khan gown she wore to a state dinner for India last fall, which remains her finest fashion moment.  Khan has established himself as a master of special event dressing.  (Surprisingly, Annette Bening was the only lady who wore Khan to the Oscars this year.)  His gowns have Halston-like sophistication and Bob Mackie-like exuberance.  They’re appropriate and also over-the-top.

What Khan does best is dresses.  He does them knee-length, cocktail length and ankle length, and he does them fitted to the body, draped asymmetrically like saris, and flowing like kaftans.  He keeps the silhouettes simple and then drenches them in intense, all-over embellishments.  It’s in these embellishments (threadwork, ostrich feathers, metallic filligree, beading, gilding, embroidery) that he excels.  Restraint is not an option; the ornament is essential to the garment.

Last week Portuguese architect Alberto Souto de Moura received the Pritzker Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize for architects, at a ceremony in Washington DC attended by Barack and Michelle Obama.  Photographs of his work show a serene, unflustered sensibility.  The buildings use a modern language less dogmatic than those espoused by Le Corbusier and Mies, one of broad, interrupted surfaces that hovers between minimalism and surrealism.

De Moura handles concrete masterfully.  American architects tend to think of reinforced concrete as a rather specialized technology that’s expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to manipulate.  De Moura works without these reservations, and within a culture with deep masonry traditions.  He’s used the material over and over again during his thirty-five year career and is able to render it in strikingly fluid, fabric-like forms.  This concrete doesn’t seem so concrete.  De Moura’s ouevre, and his Pritzker, serve as a nice rebuttal of the steel frame.  In coming decades, as construction projects in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America take a lion’s share of media attention, concrete just might overtake steel and glass as the contemporary architect’s material of choice.

There is yawning gulf between drawing and sculpture, between the presence of a sheet of paper and that of a full-bodied object in space.  Sculptor Richard Serra’s drawings from the early 1970’s to the present, on exhibit now at the Met, reach across that divide.  There are drawings that are imagistic, offering views of objects.  There are drawings that are diagramatic, sketching configurations for sculptures.  There are drawings that are architectural, huge paint-covered linen panels stapled to the wall, that play against the gallery floor, wall and ceiling.  And, most thrillingly, there are drawings that are so thickly encrusted in eddies and streams of paint that they become sculptures themselves.

Each type of drawing has a different power.  The sketches are the least compelling.  While they depict forms clearly they’re unrelated in spirit to Serra’s sculptures, which are so densely material.  (There is one stunning exception, a rendering of the “Tilted Arc” that, in four thick strokes of paintstick, captures all of that immense, looming figure.)  It’s heartening to see all the drawings together.  They show the sculptor grappling with the properties of a form that, up until the 1990’s, seems to elude him.  (One rather desperate series from the 1970’s, “Forged Drawing,” consists of hubcap-sized slabs of steel that are coated with painstick and then hung on the wall.)  But when Serra gets it right, his drawings have all the viscuous sensuality of a Rothko canvas, only with a greater sense of weight.  These drawings have no space in them, they’re all stuff.