After a long break, about 30 years in fact, Manhattan is suddenly full of architecture again. The tragedy of 9/11 switched New Yorkers on to the power and presence of the buildings that surround them, to their importance in the psyche of the city. Decades of dumb, extruded skyscrapers gave way to a sneaky seduction by sophisticated international designers. But all the action so far has taken place in the rarefied, super-rich world of architect-branded condos. So the opening of an important public building, the New Museum, has caused a bigger stir in the city than any building I can remember. The first purpose-built museum downtown, the New Museum is a striking and serene addition to the rough and ragged profile of the Bowery, Lower Manhattan’s most tenaciously ungentrified street.

The gallery is a series of stacked boxes, piled up as if by a toddler in a slightly irregular manner and sheathed in a diaphanous veil, which turns out to be nothing more than expanded metal mesh. It is a thing of lightness and luminous beauty. Built on a former parking lot amid homeless hostels, grimy missions and furniture stores, the teetering tower is a strange riposte to the solid, bricky, industrial fabric that surrounds it, a reaction perhaps to the omnipresence of the industrial chic of the parasitic galleries that have invaded the city’s toughest spaces, from Chelsea to SoHo.