Slipping beneath the portico into a tall granite grotto behind 550 Madison Avenue, I’m confronted by a mash-up of heavy-handed ’80s PoMo, tasteful Nordic modernism, and rustic romance. I squirm a little inside, but I love it. Snøhetta has liberated this columned cavern, lit by a porthole window, from a former storefront bay of the Johnson/Burgee–designed tower, furnishing it with sleek tables and chairs encircling a pile of rocks. And they’ve wrung landscape from architecture: I’m drawn to the daylight and greenery beyond, in the POPS proper, a through-block, glass-canopied garden with open-air “rooms,” swooping benches, a textured stone waterfall wall, and terraced vegetation piled up against a concrete cliff. I’m told there’s a public restroom hidden somewhere in there. Shivering with cold—unlike the enclosed “Sony Plaza Public Arcade” it replaces, 550 Madison Garden is not climate-controlled—I wolf down steaming jollof rice and curry from one of three concessions on-site, my back to the new arched window that aligns with the Madison Avenue entrance. And although t…
