Scale is the most architectural of all aesthetic variables — it’s the one that acts on your body directly, that you can’t take in from a reproduction. A photograph flattens color and composition faithfully but always lies about size, so a show built entirely on scale is a show that only exists in person. That alone makes it worth the two-block detour from the print workshop.

The question to carry in is the sharp one: is bigness here doing conceptual work, or just occupying the room? Sean Kelly usually earns the former, and the roster gives you a good test bench. Anthony McCall is the artist to seek out — his ’solid light’ works are sculpture made of nothing but a projector beam and a haze-filled room, volumes you walk through and part with your hand, the purest demonstration that scale and space are themselves the medium. Held against Fritsch’s oversized uncanny objects and Wiley’s monumental portraits, you get the full spread of what size can and can’t do. Closes August 14 — same mid-month clock as the anchor.

The shoreline is the most philosophically loaded landscape there is — it’s the edge where one certainty, ground, gives way to another, water and sky, and the painter has to decide how to render a boundary that’s always moving. It’s a threshold problem, which is your problem: the architecture of the in-between, the line that isn’t a line so much as a negotiated zone. Every painter here is making a different decision about where to put that edge and how much to let it dissolve.

Go for the range rather than any single canvas. Watching a Hudson River School coast and a contemporary invented seascape in one room shows you how differently two eras handle the identical threshold — one reaching for luminous fact, the other for pure invention, both circling the same unstable line. It’s the quiet, contemplative anchor of the walk, the opposite energy from a Chelsea group blowout, and a fitting close before the light goes. Midtown, closes August 13 — the earliest deadline of the five, so hit it first if you’re doing the full loop.

Where On the Road and Shorelines are about material that resists, Alfred is about material that vanishes — he builds images in layers of cut, flat color until every trace of the hand is gone and the surface reads as pure plane. For an architect that flatness is worth a look: it’s the aesthetic of the rendering, the diagram, the built-up field of legible color, the city reduced to its essential signage. The negotiation here is inverted — not the maker fighting the medium, but the maker erasing themselves so the image reads as fact.

Stand it against the hand-worked, resistant surfaces elsewhere on the walk and you get the full spread of how a made thing can carry, or hide, the labor of its making. A quick solo stop on the West 22nd Street stretch; closing August 14, it shares the walk’s tightest clock.

This is the show that takes the walk’s making-and-material theme out of the studio and onto the land, which is where it gets political. The road isn’t a neutral thing you travel — it’s built infrastructure, terrain cut, graded, and reshaped into route, the single most consequential act of design humans perform on a landscape. A photography show organized around ’the road’ is really a show about how the made environment negotiates with, and overrides, the ground it’s laid across.

Burtynsky is the one to seek out for exactly your reasons. His large-format aerials of quarries, tailings, and infrastructure are the clearest statement in the room that terrain is now a manufactured object — land as a designed production environment at planetary scale, beautiful and damning at once. Hold him against Salgado’s silvered images of human labor and migration and you get the two halves of the same argument: the road remakes the earth, and it moves the people. It’s the walk’s outdoor, wide-angle counterweight to the gallery-scale shows around it, and with an August 28 close it’s the one with the most runway — save it for last or let it stand alone.