Solomon LeWitt, or as everyone referred to Sol, was an American artist; he has been the subject of solo exhibitions in various museums and art galleries around the world since 1965. His sculptures have grown and bloomed around City Hall Park like a mixture of architecture and vegetation, between benches and fountains. These large sculptures intermingle between trees and flowers next to skyscrapers. Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2007 is the first outdoor analysis of his work, with 27 pieces from every stage of his career.

Prepared for the Public Art Fund by its director Nicholas Baume, this art exhibition makes the most of loans from across the globe. At a glance City Hall Park seems the wrong place to display art as it is congested and too busy, but it turns out to be an ideal summer showcase. In fact, City Hall Park is within the path of working people who stop here for a break between meetings or during lunch. People passing by seem to be mesmerized by the large white cubes, the orderly arrangements of three-dimensional geometric figures, and finally the rococo "splodges" with their twisting, melting globs of color. However, the order in which they are displayed completely depends on which entrance visitors take on their way to lunch. The ones coming from the north will come across the cubes first, while the ones coming from the south entrance will first pass the slouching rainbow tower.

The artist always balanced the organic and built environments, finding architectonic elements in nature and bringing them through fluidity and grace into geometry. LeWitt's early career seems to refute the picturesque sway of trees, reasserting the city's grid of streets and echoing the sudden angles of nearby buildings.

In the museum, LeWitt's composition comes across as a series of abstract, self-contained art, flowing from his rule-making mind and assembled by a team of fabricators. In the mid-1960s he wrote: "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."

That perfect, self-contained logic falls in City Hall Park, a place of continuous traffic, pedestrians, buildings and greenery. Here, LeWitt’s art connects with the chaotic world, with a fabric of existence outside his head and removed from his obsessive need for control. The place where the sculptures are located reveal his profound sense of urban artist who has virtually summarized the entire history of New York architecture.

The artist’s early cubes echo with One Centre Street, a building that, in its formal neoclassicism, resonate its austere pattern of vertical and horizontal bands. Those cubes also impersonate the omnipresent steel-cage framework that allowed early skyscrapers to rise at the turn of the 20th century. The white stainless steel of LeWitt's modular building-blocks complements the sleek enameled skin of the Woolworth tower, which shoots toward the sky from another end of the park.

LeWitt's work focuses on rhythm and variations in density, with volumes that huddle and expand, and lines that inch near each other before they veer apart; therefore, it is fair to say LeWitt’s work is dynamic and full of life. At City Hall Park, on a pitch of grass, in the heart of grey Manhattan, those variations pick up on New York’s ever- changing rhythms.

The dialogue between sculpture and building illuminates new aspects of both. The stacked windows and faceted planes of the architecture, distinctly shadowed in the summer sun, look suddenly more sculptural. And LeWitt's seemingly immobile boxes suddenly come to life.