New York Times 2012 (Vivien Wang)

September 19, 2012

A Living Room Suspended Over Columbus Circle

By JULIE LASKY

This week, the Public Art Fund is unveiling “Discovering Columbus,” by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi. Since 1997, Mr. Nishi, 52, has been fabricating domestic environments around artworks and public monuments, like the kitchen he built around a Picasso hanging on the wall of a museum in Nagoya, Japan.

For his latest project, he enclosed Gaetano Russo’s 1892 statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle within a living room on a scaffold more than 70 feet up. Visitors will be admitted into the 810-square-foot space for a carved-marble-eye view of Central Park.

Mr. Nishi, who lives in Germany, was in the city last week to complete the project. He discussed it with a reporter, through an interpreter.

What attracted you to the Columbus statue?

I had four or five days to look around New York City, and I was looking at so many public sculptures. Finally I decided between two things: One is Columbus and the other is an angel sort of sculpture that is part of a fountain in Central Park.

I noticed a lot of public sculptures in New York City are set on a low base, or even without a base, on the ground, compared to the ones in Europe. And I noticed that Columbus is really in a high position. That’s what attracted me. By raising up people’s eyes, you can see things with a different perspective. That’s the important point of it.

Columbus has a complicated place in American history. Did you consider that as well when making your choice?

I never thought about the historical thing. It’s purely visual. Once I’ve decided I’m going to work with this sculpture, then I research the sculpture in order to think about the interior of the living room.

This being the Home section, let’s talk about furniture. Do you have, say, a favorite sofa you use in your work?

I don’t put my taste into my living rooms. I’m not making a living room that I want to live in.

Sometimes I make a living room that I don’t totally feel comfortable with. Sometimes people who look at my living rooms say, “You have really good taste,” but it’s not really true. My concept of the art project is to make the interior exterior, and the exterior into the interior, and also make some public thing private or domestic, and the other way around.

But your décor decisions must be guided by something.

For this project, the wallpaper is pink, and the reason I chose pink is, I thought that pink is the color that is most different from Columbus Circle. Look at Columbus Circle: there’s Central Park, which is really green, and on the opposite side is the Time Warner building, which is glass and concrete, and the Museum of Arts and Design, which is similar — a sort of a new, modern building. And then there’s the north side, with some brick buildings.

From the first meeting with Bloomingdale’s, I said I would like to make a living room which is in typically American taste, and they sort of laughed, because they have only expensive furniture. So I think my living room looks a little more expensive or high class then the average living room.

At least it has a TV. I was so surprised, this huge TV: “It’s too big in my living room.” They said, “It’s a typical American thing.” I still can’t believe that people have these huge TVs. What does your own home look like?

I don’t have a TV. I don’t have a sofa. Just a bed. It’s simple, very simple.

I noticed on your Web site that you made a giant Buddha out of tofu with a fountain of soy sauce springing from its head. What’s that about?

Typical artists use either stone or iron or steel to make sculpture, but I wanted to show how we can use a completely different material. It’s another sort of altering of the view that people have.

Your site also lists several aliases you’ve worked under. What is your real name? Why don’t you use it?

My real name is Tatsuro Nishino. That’s also one of my art pieces: to change names. When I was studying in art school in Germany, I came up with the idea of exchange. I exchanged a huge clock on the tower of my school with a little one on the cafeteria wall. But what inspired me about this name project was when I got a passport. My real name is in Japanese characters, but of course in a passport you spell with the alphabet. I was always thinking, this is not my real name.

The Japanese character name is my real name.

How often do you change it?

In the beginning, every two years. But actually, Tatzu Nishi is the longest I’ve had a new name now. It’s been five years, and I’ve started feeling bored with the idea of changing names, so it’s beginning to be my name. Sometimes I feel I’m going to stick to this name, but sometimes I feel I’m going to have two more names in my life.

“Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus” will be on view at Columbus Circle through Nov. 18.

Information: (212) 223-7800 or publicartfund.org.

September 18, 2012

Brazil’s Pied Piper of Street Art

By LARRY ROHTER

It was an odd sight for an industrial street in the Ridgewood section of Queens, so of course the delivery-truck drivers, the workers from nearby manufacturing plants and other curious passersby felt compelled to stop, look and ask questions. On the maroon-colored external wall of a furniture factory, the Brazilian artist Bel Borba was busy making a large mosaic of white tile, portraying a globe surrounded by objects that looked like a cross between sunflowers and mechanical fans.

“I think I’ll call this mural ‘Global Cooling,’ ” Mr. Borba said with an animated cackle as he stepped back to survey and decide on finishing touches for the work, which he and some assistants had begun barely three hours earlier. “But that globe needs to have a running man atop it, as if he were making the world turn, like a hamster in a cage.”

That was Friday, the first day of an unusual monthlong public art residency that will take Mr. Borba all over New York City and allow him to work in whatever medium strikes his fancy. On Saturday he created a painting of a lizard and a spaceman on the asphalt on Roosevelt Island; this week he is in Red Hook, Brooklyn; Howard Beach, Queens; and other neighborhoods. Starting on Oct. 1, a short film he made with two collaborators will be shown every night for a month on 15 jumbo signs, some with multiple screens, at Times Square.

Mr. Borba, 55, is from Salvador, in the state of Bahia and the third largest city in Brazil. Its streets, walls, plazas and beaches have been his canvas since the late 1970s. He is a well-known,

even beloved, figure there, regularly greeted on the street by residents who encourage him to come and work in their neighborhoods; his output there led to a documentary about him that will open in New York next month. But he said he was delighted to receive an invitation to work in New York, so far from his comfort zone.

“Rarely in my life have I had an opportunity like this,” Mr. Borba said. “I don’t know that I’m ever going to find another city with this variety not just of ethnicities, but of neighborhoods that change from one side of the street to another. On one side it may be Caribbean, and on the other Jewish, and I like that, I feed off that.”

Since Mr. Borba works mostly with found or discarded materials — broken tiles, pieces of wood, rusted metal, plastic bottles — supplemented by power tools, duct tape and other everyday objects, the proclivity of New Yorkers to throw things away also excites him. A recent trip to scout sites and materials suitable for transformation left Mr. Borba enthusiastic, for example, about out-of-commission plastic traffic barriers, which he then cut into figures that resemble both totem poles and robots.

“I could stay here for 20 years and not run out of raw material,” he said in Portuguese. “I’m really out of my jurisdiction here, working with all kinds of materials that are new to me, and without the support structure I have in Salvador. But the material available for me to recycle is so abundant and fantastic, and the equipment is much cheaper too.”

Mr. Borba’s project, called “Diário,” or “Diary,” is part of the international multimedia “Crossing the Line” festival, sponsored by the New York branch of the French Institute Alliance Française; other participants include the guitarist Bill Frisell and the director Peter Sellars. Each of Mr. Borba’s undertakings is being filmed and edited for posting on a Web site created for the purpose. For Mr. Borba’s audience in Brazil, a blogger is posting regularly on what he is doing.

This ebullient artist is also the subject of the new documentary, “Bel Borba Aqui: A Man and a City,” which is scheduled to open at the Film Forum on Oct. 3 for a two-week run and later in the year across the country. This 95-minute film is directed by Andre Costantini, an American photographer and filmmaker, and Burt Sun, a Taiwanese artist who encountered Mr. Borba’s work while traveling in Brazil a few years ago and was immediately smitten.

“This guy is a force of nature, so it would be stupid not to make a movie about him,” said Mr. Sun, who has also enlisted as the curator of Mr. Borba’s public art project in New York. “I went to Salvador at a time when I was feeling very cynical about art and artists, but meeting Bel, feeling his energy and seeing his work and the way he inspires and is inspired by his community, that restored my faith in art.”

Born into a family of lawyers, Mr. Borba initially studied law himself. “But from the time I was a kid, I loved to draw and paint,” he said, and eventually he enrolled in the Institute of Fine Arts in Salvador. “I didn’t finish art school, either,” he added, “because of youthful rebellion and restlessness.” He worked for many years as a commercial artist until his public art became so popular and such a trademark of the city that he could make a living from it through commissions.

Mr. Borba is admittedly little known in the United States. But American specialists in public art praise him not just for his talent and ability to work in many mediums, but also for his eagerness to bring his fellow citizens into his creative process, a skill that is amply documented in the movie.

“In terms of productivity and energy, he is really a quite brilliant and facile artist, a Pied Piper who can get people to follow him,” said Ricardo Barreto, for many years the executive director of the Urban Arts Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. “He has a career as a museum artist, but his public art is a conversation with his community, and that’s what the best public artists strive for. A lot of it he goes out and just does, out on a limb by himself, both literally and figuratively.”

Mr. Borba’s method relies heavily on “instinct, intuition and spontaneity,” as he puts it. That can create difficulties in situations in which structure and order are highly valued. Mr. Sun said that in his meetings with New York cultural institutions, he was often asked to explain what specific project Mr. Borba had in mind for their locations, and was sometimes met with puzzlement when he replied, “I don’t know.”

“Bel is very unpredictable,” Mr. Sun said. “Everything depends on how he feels at that moment.”

Though focused on Mr. Borba, the film also meditates on the nature of the creative impulse, and has attracted the interest of artists of all sorts. The actress Debra Winger, who was so impressed by the film at an early screening that she signed on as an executive producer and is helping with distribution, called it “a wormhole into another world, one that we ought to know but don’t.”

“Bel is very compelling, and for him, what he does is a question of life and death,” she said.

“That sounds overdramatic, but it’s a way to understand the artist’s life. But the really beautiful part is that he’s also showing people who are not necessarily artists how to connect with art in the physical world. He may have been operating under the international radar, but he’s at the core of what every society needs.”

November 16, 2012

A First Mate Bares His Fangs

By MEKADO MURPHY

THE book “Life of Pi,” a contemplative story about a boy lost at sea with a tiger companion, is not the most obvious candidate for a film. There’s that tiger, for starters. But when Ang Lee set out to adapt Yann Martel’s acclaimed novel, he conceived an intricate plan for extensive visual effects.

That plan involved hundreds of artists. The film’s credits read almost like a short story, including people who worked around the world and around the clock to create sequences involving, for example, neon whale splashes and flying fish in bright skies.

“I’m dramatically trained, not visually trained,” Mr. Lee said during an interview in New York.

“So to me all the visuals, whatever you see, came from dramatic needs: the mood of the situation or the emotion of the character.”

Those emotions run high in this film, which begins as a family drama then moves on to one of high-seas adventure and survival. The character with the most screen time is Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma), whose father owns a zoo in India. When the family decides to move to Canada, they take some of the animals along on a trans-Atlantic voyage. A tragic storm during the crossing strands Pi on a lifeboat with a feisty Bengal tiger he names Richard Parker.

Shooting a movie with a tiger as co-star presented some real-world challenges. “We didn’t want our actor to get eaten,” Bill Westenhofer, the visual effects supervisor, said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. For this reason, and for more creative freedom, the tiger that primarily appears in the film is a digital creation from the effects house Rhythm & Hues.

Here Mr. Westenhofer discusses the technical challenges of creating a tiger that looked and felt like the real thing. More images from the process can be seen in this slide show.

Genuine Big Cat Feeds a Digital Big Cat For the digital version of Richard Parker, Mr. Westenhofer’s team studied reference footage of an actual tiger, top. And real tigers were used for a few important shots, including one with Richard Parker swimming in the ocean. Four tigers along with a trainer, Thierry le Portier, were brought in, and the crew set up a movable “boat” inside a tiger enclosure to shoot some scenes.

“We used them for single shots, where it was just the tiger in the frame, and they’re doing something that didn’t have to be all that specific in the action that we were after,” Mr. Westenhofer said. There was a debate about whether to include a real tiger at all, but Mr. Westenhofer pushed for it. “By doing that, it set our bar high for CGI,” he said, referring to computergenerated imagery. “We couldn’t cheat at all. It pushed the artists to go and deliver something that’s never been done before, something as photo-real as anyone has ever done with an animal.”

Mr. Westenhofer said some animators have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, giving them more human qualities. But the “Pi” crew was careful not to do that and to keep the digital tiger, bottom, fierce and spontaneous with animalistic instincts.

Rhythm & Hues

Building a Predator by Bone, Muscle, Flesh and Fur These images take a progressive look through the meticulous process that went into constructing the digital tiger. Artists developed each layer of the animal’s physical makeup almost as if they were working on a biology experiment.

They started with the skeleton, which they used to control basic movements (segments with common colors, top right, move together), then added muscle, skin and fur. More than a dozen artists were assigned to the fur alone, focusing, for example, on how light shimmered on it.

“We studied the reference and dialed up the muscle flexing,” Mr. Westenhofer said. “Tigers are really a mass of solid muscle surrounded by loose, baggy skin. And the way it moves and shakes and bounces around is really important to see.” He added that they got to a point where, in most animation projects, they would have considered their work done. But they continued for three

more weeks, further refining the creature’s mannerisms. (In all the process took about a year.)

Among the details fine-tuned were how his paws twitched as he shifted his weight and how he swallowed.

“It was these tiny things that, combined, made this really genuine, lifelike animal,” Mr. Westenhofer said. “But if you look at the individual things by themselves, they seem insignificant.

November 30, 2012

In Italian Ruins, New York Lessons

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

L’Aquila, capital of Abruzzo, in central Italy, is a long way from the Rockaways and Staten Island, but its struggle to recover from an earthquake may provide a cautionary tale for New York, post-Hurricane Sandy.

That earthquake, in April 2009, killed hundreds and left tens of thousands of L’Aquilans homeless, shuttering the city’s graceful and extensive historic center, which was its cultural and economic heart. “Temporary” housing was constructed: “new towns,” as Italy’s prime minister then, Silvio Berlusconi, boasted about the sad, isolated, cramped and costly apartments he ordered for displaced L’Aquilans along nowhere stretches of the city’s outskirts, cut off from mass transit and civic life. There was no infrastructure created or public consensus reached about combating sprawl, or what to save or sacrifice and how.

Since then Italian officials have kept promising to restore the city to its former self, but fewer than a dozen buildings have so far been repaired among the hundreds damaged in the center, which is a virtual ghost town. Never a tourist mecca, despite its pretty churches and squares, L’Aquila was a working town of some 75,000, home to a university and to many families with local roots dating back to the Middle Ages.

These days, tourists arrive to gawk at the rubble. Ruin porn has become the new local industry.

A sign of progress came in October, when President Giorgio Napolitano arrived for the opening of a new concert hall designed by Renzo Piano in a park in central L’Aquila, one of the few urban initiatives since the quake. Mr. Napolitano criticized the “new towns” for diverting attention and resources from the primary challenge of returning life to the city center.

The regional government has now gained control over recovery efforts from a succession of failed authorities in Rome. But magical thinking remains a problem for residents and politicians, as usual after a disaster, while memories of the quake are fading outside the region.

What’s the relevance for the New York area? Notwithstanding the need for big change and straight talk in the face of hard science about rising sea levels and increasing storms, public officials have mostly followed the Italians’ lead, promising devastated homeowners to reconstitute ravaged neighborhoods in harm’s way. They have all but conceded that a policy of retreat and relocation is a political impossibility.

I’ve gone to L’Aquila several times since the quake, the first a couple of days after it struck, most recently before the opening ceremony for Mr. Piano’s hall, to see it under construction and to speak with residents and the city’s planning chief, Pietro Di Stefano. “We went into a labyrinth of the absurd,” he told me. “We needed a new plan.”

Then he talked about retrofitting a few buildings here and there in the city center. He seemed resigned to the futility of arguing for the demolition of homes and for new construction while owners were still petitioning the state for money. That didn’t sound like much of a plan to me.

I mentioned Mr. Piano’s project. Conceived by the architect and his friend Claudio Abbado, the conductor, as a way to bring some culture and night life back to the center, the 240-seat concert hall links multicolored cubes, pavilions made of spruce from Trent, the northern Italian province that sponsored the project. (The hall was not quite finished for the opening ceremony and, as so often happens in Italy, was shut right afterward. There are supposedly plans to finish it and organize concerts next year.)

An anomaly in L’Aquila’s historic city, the hall was partly engineered as a prototype for the sort of recyclable, quake-resistant wood construction that could handsomely and cheaply replace damaged stone houses in the center, so people might finally move back there. Per square foot, the hall cost a fourth of what the “new towns” did.

At the suggestion of wood buildings, Mr. Di Stefano stiffened. He started to pet the nearest stone building as if it were the family Labrador. “Impossible,” he said.

“This is a city of stone,” he insisted. “These homes were built by families here over hundreds of years, and they have their histories. What would Florence be without Giotto, or Pisa without the tower? The buildings are who we are.”

Is a city the assortment of its buildings or the life that happens in and around them? L’Aquila has fine architecture, including Baroque churches and early-20th-century Rationalist office blocks.

These could be retrofitted and reopened, and a couple already have been. But it is really the public spaces — the streets and piazzas — that make the city special. Officials charged with saving the center, fixated on buildings instead of urbanism, seem not to realize this, and let L’Aquila die a little more each day.

And so now, in the main square, old men gather on sunny mornings, driving from miles away.

They stroll the main street, as they did before the quake, then scatter by day’s end to their farflung new homes. Antonio Antonacci, a retired lawyer, chatted in the empty Piazza Duomo with three friends when I stopped by.

“It’s still the only city center we have,” he told me.

New Yorkers aren’t particularly married to old stone houses. The city has a history of audacity and adaptability. Both have fueled the region’s prosperity. But heedless planning in the last century has also made many people skeptical about large-scale infrastructural change.

That said, some storm-ravaged New York homeowners have already made known that they’re contemplating resettling in safer neighborhoods, and Shaun Donovan, the United States secretary of housing, whom President Obama appointed to spearhead federal relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy, seems open to big ideas. A calamity can also be an opportunity, for ambitious politicians, and not least for a second-term president, now liberated to think decades ahead.

Although L’Aquila may be unlike New York in most crucial ways, its last few years suggest that a disaster doesn’t just destroy homes and take lives. It tests a city’s, and a nation’s, imagination and capacity to change.

Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.

December 3, 2012

With Some Hospitals Closed After Hurricane, E.R.’s at Others Overflow

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

A month after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, unexpectedly shutting down several hospitals, one Upper East Side medical center had so many more emergency room patients than usual that it was parking them in its lobby.

White and blue plastic screens had been set up between the front door and the elevator banks in the East 68th Street building of that hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. The screens shielded 10 gurneys and an improvised nursing station from the view of people obliviously walking in and out of the soaring, light-filled atrium.

“It’s like a World War II ward,” Teri Daniels, who had been waiting a day and a half with a relative who needed to be admitted, said last week.

Since the storm, a number of New York City hospitals have been scrambling to deal with a sharp increase in patients, forcing them to add shifts of doctors and nurses on overtime, to convert offices and lobbies to use for patients’ care, and even, in one case, to go to a local furniture store to buy extra beds.

At Beth Israel Medical Center, 11 blocks south of the Bellevue Hospital Center emergency room, which was shuttered because of storm damage, the average number of visits to the E.R. per day has risen to record levels. Visits have increased by 24 percent this November compared with last, and the numbers show no sign of dropping. Hospital admissions have risen 12 percent compared with last November.

Most of the rise in volume is from patients who had never been to Beth Israel before. An emergency room doctor at the hospital described treating one patient who said he had been born at Bellevue and had never before gone anywhere else.

Emergency room visits have gone up 25 percent at NewYork-Presybterian/Weill Cornell, which in Bellevue’s absence is the closest high-level trauma center — treating stab wounds, gun wounds, people hit by cars and the like — in Manhattan from 68th Street south. Stretchers holding patients have been lined up like train cars around the nursing station and double-parked in front of stretcher bays.

In Brooklyn, some patients in Maimonides Medical Center’s emergency room who need to be admitted are waiting two or three days for a bed upstairs, instead of four or five hours. Almost every one of the additional 1,100 emergency patients this November compared with last November came from four ZIP codes affected by the storm and served by Coney Island Hospital, a public hospital that was closed because of storm damage.

The number of psychiatric emergency patients from those same ZIP codes has tripled, in a surge that began three days before the hurricane, perhaps fueled by anxiety, as well as by displacement from flooded adult homes or programs at Coney Island Hospital, doctors said.

The Maimonides psychiatric emergency room bought five captain’s beds — which do not have railings that can be used for suicide attempts — at a local furniture store, to accommodate extra patients. The regular emergency room had to buy 27 new stretchers after the hurricane, “and we probably need a few more,” the department’s chief, Dr. John Marshall, said.

The emergency room and inpatient operations of four hospitals remain closed because of flooding and storm damage. Besides Bellevue and Coney Island, NYU Langone Medical Center and the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System, both near Bellevue on the East Side of Manhattan, are closed.

While the surge in traffic to other hospitals has been a burden, it has also been a boon, bringing more revenue.

On the Upper East Side, the storm has helped Lenox Hill Hospital, which has a history of financial problems. It took two or three wards that had been turned into offices and converted them back to space for patients. Emergency room visits are up 10 percent, and surgery has been expanded to seven days a week from five.

“We usually operate at slightly over 300 beds, and now we’re at well over 550,” Carleigh Gustafson, director of emergency nursing, said.

Conversely, administrators at the shuttered hospitals, especially NYU Langone, a major teaching center, worry that their patients and doctors are being raided, with some never to return.

NYU’s salaried doctors are being paid through January, on the condition that they do not take another job. But at the same time, they need a place to practice, so NYU administrators have been arranging for them to work as far away as New Jersey until the hospital reopens. Lenox Hill alone has taken on close to 300 NYU doctors, about 600 nurses, and about 150 doctors in training, fellows and medical students.

Obstetricians and surgeons from the closed hospitals have been particularly disadvantaged, since they are dependent on hospitals to treat their patients. Many displaced surgeons have been reduced to treating only the most desperately ill, and operating on nights and weekends, when hospitals tend to be least well staffed.

“I think there’s no question that a lot of people have postponed anything that they can postpone that is elective,” said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, senior vice president at NYU. In mid-November, Dr. Michael L. Brodman, chairman of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center, sent out a memo saying his department had taken on 26 NYU physicians, as well as nurses and residents, but “clearly, that is too much for us to handle long term.”

Since then, 15 of the physicians have gone to New York Downtown Hospital, while Mount Sinai has retained 11 doctors and 26 nurses.

“We are guests in other people’s homes,” Dr. Brotman of NYU said, “and we are guests who have to some degree overstayed their welcome.”

Joanna Walters contributed reporting.

October 26, 2012

Motive in Killings of 2 Children Remains a Mystery

By JAMES BARRON and WENDY RUDERMAN

A horrified mother walked into her Upper West Side apartment on Thursday to see the family’s nanny stabbing herself with the same bloody kitchen knife that she had already used on two of the woman’s young children, who lay dead in a bathtub, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Friday.

Mr. Kelly said the mother, Marina Krim, had left the two children — a 2-year-old boy and a 6year-old girl — with the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, while Ms. Krim took her middle child, a 3year-old girl, to a swimming lesson. He said Ms. Ortega was supposed to meet Ms. Krim and the 3-year-old at a dance studio after the swimming lesson.

They never showed up, he said.

Ms. Krim, worried, walked home to the ornate prewar building where the family had lived for the last couple of years and found a scene of almost unimaginable horror.

Mr. Kelly said detectives had been unable to question Ms. Ortega, who was in critical condition at a hospital.

Friends said Ms. Ortega had apparently had an up-and-down year, getting and losing an apartment in the Bronx and being forced to move back with her sister on Riverside Drive in Harlem. They said she had changed for the worse, looking harried, gaunt and older in recent months. Some said the once-gregarious woman who greeted people warmly, with “Hola, vecina!” — “Hello, neighbor!” — now spoke little and seemed to avoid eye contact. One friend said she had also run into financial problems, even though the Krims paid her well.

Mr. Kelly said Ms. Ortega’s family had told the police that she may have visited a psychologist recently or had been considering doing so.

But exactly what prompted her to attack the children — children who, by her friends’ accounts, she was devoted to — remained a mystery on Friday as passers-by added to a memorial outside the Krims’ building, at 57 West 75th Street.

Two small children who appeared to be about the same ages as the two Krim children laid stuffed animals — a turtle and a dog — beside the flowers and candles that others had placed outside the building. Their mother watched.

Another woman who stopped in front of the building was Rachel Cedar, 35. She said her first thought when she woke up on Friday was that her two boys, ages 3 and 5, “are safe in bed.”

“This poor mother is just like me,” Ms. Cedar said with tears in her eyes. “I have a baby sitter who I adore and trust her implicitly. She’s like a sister to me.”

She shared more thoughts about having a nanny: “It’s the ultimate act of trust. You have to rely on other people. It’s hard to raise kids in New York.” She called what had happened in the apartment on the second floor “a betrayal.”

The children’s grandfather, too, was at a loss to explain what would have prompted such an attack.

“They were very good to her,” Mr. Krim’s father, William Krim, 74, said. “We’re just the most stunned people in the world — I mean, they treated this woman so well.”

He said the children had been “the loves of our lives.”

‘It’s Just a Tragedy’ The police identified the children as Nessie, the 3-year-old who lived; the 6-year-old, Lucia, who was known as Lulu; and 2-year-old Leo. Ms. Krim wrote a blog where she documented “life with the little Krim kids” and showed them in photos around New York City, eating Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, pretending to use a pay phone, napping on the sofa and picking pumpkins. Lulu had been discovered by a talent agent and had done some modeling as a baby in California, the parents carefully saving the fees she earned with an eye toward college. Leo was said to be sweet, smart and easygoing.

“It’s just a tragedy,” William Krim said. “You couldn’t find more beautiful or better kids than they were.”

Lulu, he said, was invited to a birthday party almost every week. “Kevin would laugh, ‘I can’t have a social life, I’m always taking Lulu to birthday parties,’ ” William Krim said. “They just doted on their kids — they would always take them with them. Everywhere they went, they brought the kids.” He said he had put his daughter-in-law’s number in his cellphone under the name “World’s Best Mom.” Mr. Krim said his son and daughter-in-law — who he said taught a class at the American Museum of Natural History near their apartment — had hired Ms. Ortega a couple of years ago.

When the family went on vacation, he said, they paid for a ticket for Ms. Ortega to fly to the Dominican Republic to see her relatives there. Once they went there with her because, he said, the nanny wanted them to meet her own family.

Officials at Public School 87, where the 6-year-old was a first grader, sent an e-mail to parents that called the stabbings “a terrible tragedy.” The e-mail said a crisis management team would be at the school, three blocks from the Krims’ building, on Friday to “provide support to all children and adults” who needed it “during this terrible time.” One nanny, dropping off an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, said the school had canceled a field trip to a Broadway theater that had been scheduled for Friday.

And some parents said they were grappling with what to tell their children. William Davila, whose daughter Maya is a fifth grader, said he hoped she did not know the dead girl. He said that in thinking about what the parents were going through, “I don’t have words for something like that.”

It was a question that echoed through the neighborhood and across New York. Sara Park, who with her husband runs a dry-cleaning shop right across from the Krims’ building, shook her head in disbelief on Friday and asked: “What kind of person would do that?”

“It was a perfect, beautiful family,” she said.

Mr. Krim was a customer, she said, and Ms. Krim sometimes came in with the children. She recalled the day Ms. Krim brought the children in to have the boy’s tiny suit altered for a wedding they were going to. “He didn’t want to stand still,” she said. Ms. Krim gave him candy to try to induce cooperation — to no avail, Ms. Park said.

Updated Details From Police The tragedy unfolded rapidly on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Kelly had said after a briefing that evening that when Ms. Krim returned around 5:30 p.m., she found a dark apartment. She went to the lobby and asked the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. Told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment. She looked around in the quiet rooms.

Finally, she turned on the lights in the bathroom — and saw her two children in the bathtub. (Mr. Kelly said at the Thursday briefing that the nanny was unconscious on the floor. The police said they spoke with Ms. Krim later on and pieced together the more detailed account that he gave at the Friday briefing, when he said Ms. Krim witnessed the nanny stabbing herself when she turned on the bathroom light. The police said they found Ms. Ortega unconscious on the floor when they arrived minutes later.)

On Friday, Charlotte Friedman, who lives on the seventh floor of the Krims’ building, said she saw the nanny and the two children in the elevator around 5 p.m. on Thursday. Everything looked normal, she said: the girl was friendly, as she usually was, and the nanny said nothing.

“I never saw her as a warm nanny,” Ms. Friedman said.

Ms. Friedman said she asked the girl if she had gone on a play date. The girl said she had been dancing. “She looked delightful,” she said, describing her as “happy, happy, happy.”

They got out on the second floor; Ms. Friedman rode on to her apartment to drop off some packages, and then went out again about 30 to 40 minutes later. “I heard screams from the elevator on my way out,” she said. In the lobby, she saw the mother holding the third child and realized it was Ms. Krim who had been screaming.

A law enforcement official said nothing in Ms. Ortega’s background had pointed to anything like what happened on Thursday.

“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”

By late Friday afternoon, Ms. Ortega had not been formally charged in the case. Autopsies showed that said Lucia had died from “multiple stab and incise wounds” — cuts that typically cause rapid bleeding — and her brother of “incise wounds of the neck,” according to a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Ms. Ortega’s friend Maria Lajara said Ms. Ortega had been living two floors below in her sister’s apartment. Ms. Lajara remembered the day last spring when Ms. Ortega stopped by and asked her to pray for her — pray that she would find a new apartment where she could live with her teenage son.

Soon, Ms. Lajara said, “she knocked on my door; she was so happy.”

“She said: ‘I got the apartment! I came to say goodbye,’ ” Ms. Lajara continued.

The new apartment was in the Bronx, and they kept in touch after she moved.

Ms. Lajara also said Ms. Ortega had talked about how happy she was with her worklife. She said Ms. Ortega had told her that she loved her job with the Krims. She told Ms. Lajara that she was paid well and treated well. She also said she was so fond of Ms. Krim that she often put in extra hours to help her.

“She really loved them, the family,” Ms. Lajara said. “She loved the kids. She would take them to the park, and she said the mom was a really good person.”

Hint of Financial Difficulties In addition to the good pay and travel, the Krims were generous to Ms. Ortega in other ways, Ms. Lajara said. In March, Ms. Ortega passed along to Ms. Lajara a leather Ann Taylor jacket that had been a gift from Ms. Krim.

But Ms. Ortega also hinted at financial troubles. Another neighbor said she had been selling jewelry and makeup to make some extra money. Ms. Lajara said that Ms. Ortega had given someone she knew some makeup to peddle and that the woman had not come through with the money. In the last few weeks, Ms. Ortega moved back to her sister’s crowded apartment at 610 Riverside Drive. She had lost the Bronx apartment.

The superintendent at the Riverside Drive building, Fernando Mercado, said she had rented the Bronx apartment from an acquaintance who moved to the Dominican Republic. But the apartment was never in Ms. Ortega’s name, and the tenant apparently returned and threw Ms. Ortega out.

Another neighbor, Ruben Rivas, 49, described her as “kind of devastated,” and others said she had seemed nervous lately, and tired. Kenia Galo, 25, said she had mentioned it when she saw Ms. Ortega in the elevator of the Riverside Drive building. “ ‘I am tired,’ she would say. ‘Work,’ ” Ms. Galo recalled.

In the neighborhood where the Krims lived, where nannies are often an integral part of children’s lives, news of the stabbings was met with stark disbelief. In so many households, nannies are there for meal times, for bedtime, for birthdays and holidays, even vacations. Indeed, on her blog, Ms. Krim described how she and her family had spent several days visiting Ms. Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic, speaking to just how close her relationship had been with the family.

“We spent the past 9 days in the Dominican Republic. We spent half the time at our nanny, Josie’s sisters home in Santiago,” she wrote. “We met Josie’s amazing familia!!! And the Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!! More pics to come!!”

Recent Arrivals in City The Krims’ neighbors said they had moved to New York from California in the last couple of years. Mr. Krim is an executive at CNBC and had previously worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo.

Mark Hoffman, the president of CNBC, issued a statement on Friday that called the stabbings “a senseless act of violence.”

“There are simply no words to convey the magnitude of this tragedy,” Mr. Hoffman said.

William Krim said that CNBC had arranged for them to stay at a hotel after they left the hospital on Thursday night. “They have not gone back to the apartment,” Mr. Krim said. “I don’t know if they ever will. I don’t know if I could.”

He said they were two Californians who met in a restaurant in Venice Beach. Marina Krim had grown up in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and had degrees from the University of Southern California. Kevin Krim was from Thousand Oaks, Calif., where he was a football star. He went on to Harvard and was working at McKinsey and Company in Los Angeles when they met, William Krim said. They have been married for nine years, he said; Ms. Krim had worked in California for a wholesaler of powders made from exotic fruits, like acai berries and pomegranates, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In one post on her blog, Ms. Krim talked about how she cherished her time with her youngest child, the 2-year-old, who was known as Lito: “One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself. Ok, I’m near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!! He’s obsessed with collecting acorns he finds ‘on the floor,’ he loves riding ‘the school bus’ and he happily plays by himself for long periods of time. Here he has set up his kitchen in the living room and is ‘making bacon’ (not sure where he learned the word ‘bacon’).”

Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, Kia Gregory, Anemona Hartocollis, Daniel Krieger, Randy Leonard, William K. Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Jack Styczynski and Vivian Yee. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: October 30, 2012 An article on Saturday about the chaotic life of Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny accused of fatally stabbing two children in her care, included incorrect information from the New York Police Department about her condition at the time. Ms. Ortega was conscious; she was not in a medically induced coma.

April 12, 2012

The Odd-Man-Out Town House

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

THE accepted way to refer to a row of houses of two alternating designs is A-B-A-B-A. Sometimes the variations of longer rows make that A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D, which can wind up sounding like the opening of a Beethoven symphony.

There are only five houses in the row at 323-331 West 76th Street, but the wildly ornery center building at 327 gives it a notation something like A-B-HAIR ON FIRE-B-A. Now an investor moving in from New Jersey has taken over this peculiar centerpiece, gutting the middle for an elevator and putting his own mark on the perplexing structure.

William Jacob and Reuben Skinner were active West Side developers, and in April 1891 they filed plans for a row of five houses at 323-331 West 76th Street, a particularly agreeable block with good views of the river. Their architect, Charles T. Mott, made the two outside pairs, 323325 (A-B) and 329-331 (B-A), sober, dignified compositions in chastely set brownstone and mottled Pompeian brick, long and thin, the color of cinnamon toast. The windows are surrounded by a subtle pattern of cabled fluting, the channels partially filled. All four houses have open loggias, screened by brick columns, and the edges of each house are lined with a subtle fretwork.

But at the center house, the fiery, untamed red brick, although dimmed by time and soil, goes off like five-alarm chili. Instead of the dainty bows and swells of the flanking buildings, it has a bulbous, off-center bay window, abruptly ending halfway up. The loggia is unroofed, so that the facade recedes unexpectedly at the top floor, leaving a gap tooth in the row. It’s as anticontextual as a glass skyscraper in the West Village.

An 1892 ad in The Real Estate Record and Guide offered some of the houses for sale at $38,000 to $45,000, noting that they had the new kind of exposed plumbing, seen as more sanitary than earlier plumbing and fixtures cased with wood. William Brewster bought the center house, convenient for his commute down to Brewster & Co., his family’s famous coachworks in Longacre (later Times) Square.

Brewster was the leading coach maker in the United States. The Rockefellers, Morgans and Astors all rode in Brewsters with their family crests painted on the glistening enameled bodies.

According to a history of the company posted at coachbuilt.com, Brewster carried a knife with him on his factory rounds and gouged deep scratches into any bodywork that displeased him.

Brewster soon sold the house to Cyrus Clark, sometimes called “The father of the West Side.”

After retiring from the silk business, Clark had gone into real estate and campaigned vigorously on behalf of developing the West Side. He backed street paving and the completion of Riverside Park, and came out against stables, trolleys and other nuisances on prestigious streets.

Cyrus Clark was no relation to Edward Clark, who built the Dakota, and who also proposed American Indian names for the West Side avenues, like Idaho Place for West End Avenue.

Cyrus Clark said the idea was ridiculous, and West End Avenue it has remained.

After Cyrus Clark’s death in 1909, 327 West 76th sold at auction for $37,700. In the late 1910s, Alberto Bimboni ran his vocal studio here, offering lessons in French and Italian opera, and in 1930 the house was occupied by a lawyer, John Dwyer, his family, and a maid and cook. Dwyer told the census taker the house was worth $100,000, but plenty of his neighbors had taken in lodgers.

The house was later split into apartments, and had been reconverted when Leonard Zelin, an investor, bought it two years ago. After numerous trips to the top of the house and back down, Mr. Zelin decided that he and his family might as well have an elevator.

Most of the bathrooms had to be ripped out and rebuilt, but the job is now just about done, and indeed an elevator makes a private town house a far more agreeable enterprise. Mr. Zelin works from several screens of financial information from a broad, sunny room on the third floor, where his rabbit, Blue, hops in and out of its cage.

Soon Mr. Zelin’s architect, Paul Golden, will be cleaning the brickwork, which has a haze of dirt, and repairing the terra-cotta and brownstone trim, and the house will be its flamboyant old self again.

So why would Jacob and Skinner, two career real estate developers, uncork a bottle of pink Champagne smack in the middle of their sober effort — isn’t beige always the safest investment?

Yes, it is, but in this case 327 West 76th wasn’t an investment. Jacob and Skinner had bought the land for the row in 1890, and filed plans in April 1891. However, Brewster had acquired the land under what became No. 327 three months earlier, and the deed stipulated that the developers were to build a house to his specifications.

Apparently Brewster, a stickler for perfection, knew just what he wanted and didn’t care what the neighbors thought.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

September 1, 2012

Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing

By MICHAEL GRAVES

Princeton, N.J. IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?

The computer, of course. With its tremendous ability to organize and present data, the computer is transforming every aspect of how architects work, from sketching their first impressions of an idea to creating complex construction documents for contractors. For centuries, the noun “digit” (from the Latin “digitus”) has been defined as “finger,” but now its adjectival form, “digital,” relates to data. Are our hands becoming obsolete as creative tools? Are they being replaced by machines? And where does that leave the architectural creative process?

Today architects typically use computer-aided design software with names like AutoCAD and Revit, a tool for “building information modeling.” Buildings are no longer just designed visually and spatially; they are “computed” via interconnected databases.

I’ve been practicing architecture since 1964, and my office is not immune. Like most architects, we routinely use these and other software programs, especially for construction documents, but also for developing designs and making presentations. There’s nothing inherently problematic about that, as long as it’s not just that.

Architecture cannot divorce itself from drawing, no matter how impressive the technology gets.

Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design.

Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands. This last statement is absolutely crucial to the difference between those who draw to conceptualize architecture and those who use the computer.

Of course, in some sense drawing can’t be dead: there is a vast market for the original work of respected architects. I have had several one-man shows in galleries and museums in New York and elsewhere, and my drawings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt.

But can the value of drawings be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.

For decades I have argued that architectural drawing can be divided into three types, which I call the “referential sketch,” the “preparatory study” and the “definitive drawing.” The definitive drawing, the final and most developed of the three, is almost universally produced on the computer nowadays, and that is appropriate. But what about the other two? What is their value in the creative process? What can they teach us?

The referential sketch serves as a visual diary, a record of an architect’s discovery. It can be as simple as a shorthand notation of a design concept or can describe details of a larger composition. It might not even be a drawing that relates to a building or any time in history. It’s not likely to represent “reality,” but rather to capture an idea.

These sketches are thus inherently fragmentary and selective. When I draw something, I remember it. The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place.

That visceral connection, that thought process, cannot be replicated by a computer.

The second type of drawing, the preparatory study, is typically part of a progression of drawings that elaborate a design. Like the referential sketch, it may not reflect a linear process. (I find computer-aided design much more linear.) I personally like to draw on translucent yellow tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before and, again, creating a personal, emotional connection with the work.

With both of these types of drawings, there is a certain joy in their creation, which comes from the interaction between the mind and the hand. Our physical and mental interactions with drawings are formative acts. In a handmade drawing, whether on an electronic tablet or on paper, there are intonations, traces of intentions and speculation. This is not unlike the way a musician

might intone a note or how a riff in jazz would be understood subliminally and put a smile on your face.

I find this quite different from today’s “parametric design,” which allows the computer to generate form from a set of instructions, sometimes resulting in so-called blob architecture. The designs are complex and interesting in their own way, but they lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.

Years ago I was sitting in a rather boring faculty meeting at Princeton. To pass the time, I pulled out my pad to start drawing a plan, probably of some building I was designing. An equally bored colleague was watching me, amused. I came to a point of indecision and passed the pad to him.

He added a few lines and passed it back.

The game was on. Back and forth we went, drawing five lines each, then four and so on.

While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language.

We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay “wet” in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.

As I work with my computer-savvy students and staff today, I notice that something is lost when they draw only on the computer. It is analogous to hearing the words of a novel read aloud, when reading them on paper allows us to daydream a little, to make associations beyond the literal sentences on the page. Similarly, drawing by hand stimulates the imagination and allows us to speculate about ideas, a good sign that we’re truly alive.

Michael Graves is an architect and an emeritus professor at Princeton.

September 12, 2012, 5:54 pm

The iPhone 5: My First Impressions Apple unveiled the new iPhone 5 today in San Francisco. As it turns out, most of the individual rumors about it were true - but even so, they didn't describe the whole package.

The new phone is the same width as the old one, but taller and thinner, as though someone ran over the old iPhone with a steamroller. When held horizontally, the four-inch screen has 16:9 proportions, a perfect fit for HDTV shows and a better fit for movies. The added screen length gives the Home screen room for a fifth row of icons.

The band around the edges is still silver on the white iPhone - but on the black model, it's black with a gleaming, reflective bezel. It looks awesome.

The back is aluminum now. The strips at the top and bottom of the back are made of glass, the better to allow the wireless signal through - but as a side benefit, you can now tell which way is front as you fish the thing out of your pocket.

The processor, with a new design, is twice as fast, according to Apple. And the iPhone has 4G LTE, meaning superfast Internet in select cities.

Not many rumor mills predicted the improvement in the camera. It's an eight-megapixel model with an f/2.4 aperture, meaning that it lets in a lot of light. The panorama mode is the best you've ever seen: as you swing the camera in an arc in front of you, a preview screen shows you the resulting panorama growing in real time. I took only two panorama shots in my limited time with the iPhone 5, but they came out crazy good.

The camera takes 40 percent less time between shots, it can recognize up to 10 faces (for focus and exposure purposes) and it can take still photos even while you're filming video.

The new phone also offers better battery life (eight hours of talk time or Web browsing), according to Apple (I haven't tested it yet). It also has noise cancellation both for outgoing and incoming sound. The phone is also ready for wideband audio - your callers won't have that tinny phone sound, but richer, more FM-radioish sound - but that requires the carrier to upgrade its network. The catch: no American carriers have announced plans to do that.

At first glance, there's really only one cause for pause: Apple has replaced the 30-pin charging/syncing connector that's been on every iPhone, iPad and iPod since 2003. According to Apple, it's simply too big for its new, super-thin, super-packed gadgets.

So with the iPhone and the new iPod models also announced today, Apple is replacing that inchwide connector with a new, far smaller one it's calling Lightning.

I'll grudgingly admit that the Lightning connector is a great design: it clicks nicely into place, but it can be yanked out quickly. It goes in either way - there's no "right side up," as there was with the old connector. And it's tiny, which is Apple's point.

Still, think of all those charging cables, docks, chargers, car adapters, hotel-room alarm clocks, speakers and accessories-hundreds of millions of gadgets that will no longer fit the iPhone.

Apple will sell two adapters, a simple plug adapter for $30 or one with a six-inch cable for $40, to accommodate accessories that can't handle the plug adapter.

That's way, way too expensive. These adapters should not be a profit center for Apple; they should be a gesture of kindness to those of us who've bought accessories based on the old connector. There's going to be a lot of grumpiness in iPhoneland, starting with me.

Overall, though, Apple seems to have put its focus on the important things you want in an app phone: size, shape, materials, sound quality, camera quality and speed (both operational and Internet data), and that's good. I'll have a full review once I've had some time to test the thing.

The new iPhone goes on sale on Sept. 21 for $200 with a two-year contract from Verizon, Sprint or AT&T. (That's the 16-gigabyte model. You can get 32 gigs for $300 or 64 gigs for $400.)

If you're content with last year's technology - or 2010's - you can also get the iPhone 4 free with a two-year contract, or the iPhone 4S (16 gigs) for $100 with contract.

The holiday shopping season has begun.

• • •

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October 25, 2012

Forged From the Fires of the 1960s

By KEN JOHNSON

There is a paradox at the heart of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,” an exhibition at MoMA PS1 about black artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles during a time of revolutionary changes in art and society. It is not specifically addressed by the exhibition, which was organized by Kellie Jones, a Columbia University art historian, and had its debut at the Hammer Museum last year as part of the Californian extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” But I think it goes some way toward explaining why so few black artists have been embraced by the predominantly white high-end art world. It has to do with the relationship of black artists to Modernist tradition and the differences between the lives of blacks and whites in this country.

The first piece you encounter on entering the exhibition, a welded-steel construction by Melvin Edwards called “August the Squared Fire” (1965), is emblematic. It consists of an upright rectangular framework within which a concatenation of twisted, bent, boxy forms is held, as if frozen in the moment of tumbling through a door or window. Formally, you have a dialogue between stasis and dynamism, and psychologically, between reason and feeling.

Such dualities would be enough on which to base judgment and interpretation were this a piece by, say, the white junk sculptor Richard Stankiewicz. But it makes a difference to know that Mr. Edwards is African-American and has for decades been producing small, wall-mounted assemblages of industrial steel parts called “The Lynch Fragments,” a few of which are in the show.

There is the allusive title “August the Squared Fire” to consider too. The most violent episode of civil unrest in the city’s history up to that time happened in the predominantly poor and black neighborhood of Watts in August 1965. So Mr. Edwards’s sculpture can be read as a metaphor for the struggle of black people to break through barriers that have kept them down in America.

The Watts uprising was galvanizing for other artists in the exhibition, among them Noah Purifoy, whose densely compacted assemblages of found materials are like the children of a Dadaist and an unhinged folk artist. According to Ms. Jones’s catalog essay, Mr. Purifoy has said that the Watts calamity made him an artist. He and the fellow assemblagists John T. Riddle Jr. and John Outterbridge began to make sculptures using rubble and detritus left in the aftermath of the riots.

Ms. Jones writes, “Purifoy, John Riddle and John Outterbridge reinterpreted Watts as a discursive force, emblematic of both uncompromising energy and willful re-creation, using the artistic currency of assemblage.”

Herein lies the paradox. Black artists did not invent assemblage. In its modern form it was developed by white artists like Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, David Smith and Robert Rauschenberg. For these artists assemblage was an expression of freedom from conservative aesthetics and parochial social mores. It did not come out of anything like the centuries-long black American experience of being viewed and treated as essentially inferior to white people. It was the art of people who already were about as free as anyone could be.

Thanks to white artists like George Herms, Bruce Conner and Ed Kienholz, assemblage was popular on the West Coast in the 1960s. Appropriated by the artists in “Now Dig This!,” however, it took on a different complexion. It became less a playful messing with habitual ways of thinking, à la Dada and Surrealism, and more an expression of social solidarity.

Mr. Riddle’s “Untitled (Fist)” (1965), for example, is in the form of an old shovel standing on its handle, its business end cut and bent into the form of a clenched hand. This is a far cry from Duchamp’s snow shovel titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm.” Duchamp’s work is a piece of deracinated, intellectual mischief-making designed to question relations between language and reality. Mr. Riddle’s is about a particular population of people digging itself out of a real-world debacle.

If I am right that most of the work in “Now Dig This!” promotes solidarity, then this poses a problem for its audience. It divides viewers between those who, because of their life experiences, will identify with the struggle for black empowerment, and others for whom the black experience remains more a matter of conjecture. Those who identify may tend to respond favorably to what those viewing from a more distanced perspective may regard as social realist clichés, like the defiant fist.

There are some black artists who finesse the difference, David Hammons being a brilliant example and, tellingly, the only artist in this show to be lionized by the mainstream art establishment. He is a Duchampian trickster who toys in surprising ways with signifiers of black culture, poetically unsettling entrenched representations of blackness on both sides of the racial divide.

For me, the exhibition’s most beautiful work is “Bag Lady in Flight,” which Mr. Hammons first made in the 1970s and recreated in 1990. It consists of grease-stained brown shopping bags cut and folded into pleats fanning up and down like wings, the whole extending horizontally almost 10 feet. Pleats along the lower right edge bear triangles of nappy hair, forming a pattern like that of a bird’s wing. It is an ancient notion that angels might reside in the most degraded of human forms, one that Mr. Hammons here updates to inspiring effect. You don’t have to be black to feel that.

Black artists who have gained recognition in the high-end art world have operated in the Hammonsian mode. Robert Colescott, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker and Jayson Musson, a k a Hennessey Youngman, are some who complicate how we think about prejudice and stereotyping. The art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity. Covert solidarity of liberal white folks? That is another story.

“Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” runs through March 11 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org.

August 23, 2012

Eye Candy or Eyesore?

By KEN JOHNSON

Public art makes me think of what the Conceptualist Douglas Huebler once said: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” That may be a funny thing for an artist to say, but if you live in a place as densely packed with objects of all kinds as New York City, you may appreciate its wisdom. Nevertheless, for better or worse, temporary public art displays pop up all over the city during the warm seasons in hopes of adding beauty and zest to the urban fabric.

A stretch of Park Avenue is one place where the necessity of public art comes into question right now. There a series of monumental, bulbous figures clad in colorful mosaic tiles by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) punctuates the traffic islands from 52nd to 60th Streets. Dating from 1983 to 2001, they include simplified but recognizable portraits of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, as well as a number of renditions of curvy, knob-headed female beauties and a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.

Back in the ’60s, when Ms. de Saint Phalle was developing her aesthetic, figures like these had a goofy, liberationist vibe. But the works here seem woefully outdated, more tacky than visionary.

As a counterpoint to Ms. de Saint Phalle’s strenuously playful works, a quartet of abstract metal sculptures by John Chamberlain occupies the plaza of the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Made from 2008 to 2010, they are unlike the Abstract Expressionist conglomerations of automobile body parts he was known for.

Mainly they consist of tubular elements, made of crushed sheet metal, that resemble elongated elephant legs bound together into knotlike configurations. They were copied from small maquettes that Mr. Chamberlain created by molding aluminum foil with his hands. Colored metallic green, copper and silver, they are weird hybrids of beauty and ugliness. Here on the Seagram Building’s porch, they call to mind the old dismissive label for abstract sculpture on corporate plazas: “plop art.”

As chance would have it, there is a piece of outdoor sculpture in the same neighborhood representing the opposite of the beautifying imperative. Installed on the plaza of Lever House, it is a giant rat, one of those balloons that labor union strikers often bring with them to represent masters of the capitalist universe, but here cast in bronze by the team of young artist-provocateurs known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. In a poetically just world, it would be permanently installed on Wall Street within waving distance of the raging bull.

The rat, titled “The New Colossus,” accompanies an exhibition of the group’s works in the glassed-in lobby of Lever House. It consists of real objects, like mops in buckets, vacuum cleaners, a step ladder and office furniture, scattered about the space. Each has an audio speaker built into it that is connected by radio to a video montage on a flat screen called “Art History With Labor: 95 Theses.” Different professional actors’ voices enunciating texts about art and labor

emanate from the speakers, as if these objects associated with daily work had themselves become animated, like ventriloquists’ dummies, by unionizing passions.

I wonder what the denizens of this zone of corporate business and super-expensive domiciles think about the Bruces’ agitprop? It is hard to imagine many of them being aroused to revolutionary fervor. Still, the incongruity itself is refreshing. In this respect it is worth noting that the Lever House art program is privately sponsored, with the former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Richard Marshall organizing its exhibitions. It is rare to find such baldly partisan expression as the Bruces’ in outdoor art sponsored by public institutions. Offense is so easily taken, especially if taxpayer money is involved.

A more circumspect approach to political art can be found in two pieces included in “Common Ground,” a 10-artist exhibition in City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, organized by the Public Art Fund. “It’s Never Too Late to Say Sorry,” by the team Elmgreen & Dragset, consists of a glass case displaying a gleaming aluminum megaphone. The case is locked, but a descriptive label explains that once a day a performer will open it and “activate” the piece. No actor showed up while I was there, but in an online video of the sculpture’s debut in Rotterdam you get to see a man unlock the case, take out the megaphone, hold it to his mouth and cry out, “It is never too late to say, ‘Sorry!’,” whereupon he returns the bullhorn to its case and walks away.

Placed across the park’s circular central plaza is Amalia Pica’s “Now, Speak!,” a podium cast in concrete that seems to invite people to step up and say whatever is on their minds. Otherwise implacably silent, it shares with Elmgreen & Dragset’s piece a funereal feeling. Both could be memorials to the loss of a widely shared and well-developed public discourse.

As Martha Schwendener observed in her review in The New York Times, other works in “Common Ground” exemplify the distinctive language of high-end contemporary art. Paul McCarthy’s colossal inflated ketchup bottle; Christian Jankowski’s plaque announcing the burial of his remains somewhere in the park; Justin Matherly’s rough re-creation of a part of the Ancient Roman sculpture “Laocoön and His Sons,” elevated on a platoon of aluminum walkers: these as well as works by Matthew Day Jackson, Thomas Schütte and Jenny Holzer speak in tongues likely to be as mystifying to the public as they are familiar to people conversant in the polyglot lingo of today’s art world.

There is another, more democratic — utopian, even — rationale for presenting this sort of art to the public. It might interrupt the usual flow of collective consciousness, diverting minds from routine compliance with the banal order of things and opening up ordinarily hidden vistas of imaginative vision.

A more viewer-friendly example of that approach is an installation called “Pet Sounds” by the sculptor Charles Long at Madison Square Park in Manhattan. The main elements are large, cheerfully colored fiberglass blobs resembling extraterrestrial or subaquatic life forms as imagined by the makers of “Ghostbusters.”

Some stand on their own; one sits on a park bench; another sprawls on a picnic table. All are connected to swerving hand railings that create winding pathways for visitors. A close encounter with any of the blobs reveals that each is equipped with a small speaker that emits futuristic electronic noises. A kind of surrealistic petting zoo with a nod to the Beach Boys, Mr. Long’s creation requires little esoteric knowledge to enjoy. Its generosity of spirit is infectious.

Although very different in style from Mr. Long’s sculpture, works by Oscar Tuazon in Brooklyn Bridge Park also aim to tweak everyday consciousness. “People,” the most complex of three pieces there, consists of a poured concrete handball wall with a tall dead tree attached to one vertical edge and an old basketball hoop and backboard attached to a truncated branch. Placed near a chain-link fence setting parkland off from an adjacent construction site, it looks less like art than like an ad hoc construction waiting to be broken down and carted away by a demolition crew. Another production of the Public Art Fund, it reflects a considerable uncertainty about who it wants its public to be.

You might suppose that the High Line would be a good site for outdoor art. Thus far, however, the park’s public art program has done little to distinguish itself. This summer’s effort, called “Lilliput,” sounds like a good idea. Organized

by Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s art curator, it presents small-scale sculptures by six artists distributed in inconspicuous places to either side of the main walkway.

Only one piece creates the sort of surprise you would hope for: Tomoaki Suzuki’s “Carson,” a startlingly realistic, twofoot-tall portrait of a young man with bleached hair wearing tight black jeans and a black motorcycle jacket. Made of carved and painted wood, this miniature hipster stands nonchalantly on gravel between old steel train rails, oblivious to the giant tourists who gawk at him or stop to pose next to him for snapshots.

Nothing else in “Lilliput” has such a galvanizing relationship to its environment. Though mildly appealing, Francis Upritchard’s Rodinesque pair of bronze simian creatures and Oliver Laric’s colorfully striped cast resin portrait of Sun Tzu with two faces like the Roman god Janus, would be seen to better advantage in an indoor gallery.

The High Line public art program faces an unusual challenge. The site is almost a mile and a half long but mostly no wider than a one-way street, and grass and other plantings take up a lot of that space. Because of its popularity, it is pretty congested in nice weather. With vendors selling drinks and snacks, as well, and so much nonart to see in different directions near and far and up and down, there is almost too much going on. Does the High Line need art on top of all that? I’m not convinced that it does.

Site Specific BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION: ‘ART HISTORY WITH LABOR’ Through Sept. 28. Lever House, 390 Park Avenue, at 53rd Street; leverhouseartcollection.com.

‘COMMON GROUND’ Through Nov. 30. City Hall Park, between Broadway and Park Row, Lower Manhattan; publicartfund.org/commonground.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Through Nov. 16. Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets; gagosian.com.

‘LILLIPUT’ Through April 14. The High Line, six sculptures between 30th and Gansevoort Streets and 10th and 11th Avenues, Manhattan; thehighline.org.

CHARLES LONG: ‘PET SOUNDS’ Through Sept. 9. Madison Square Park, 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues; madisonsquarepark.org/art.

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE ON PARK AVENUE Through Nov. 15. Park Avenue between 52nd and 60th Streets; nikidesaintphalle.org.

OSCAR TUAZON: ‘PEOPLE’ Through April 26. Brooklyn Bridge Park; entrance at Old Fulton and Furman Streets, Dumbo. publicartfund.org/oscartuazon.

August 24, 2008

ART

Public Art, Eyesore to Eye Candy

By ROBERTA SMITH ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world.

At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public

sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls.

But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.

To be sure, this new public sculpture is not always good. (Damien Hirst’s “Virgin Mother” at Lever House comes to mind.) If this kind of work may not be batting much above .300, hits are happening, showing art’s ability to reach larger audiences (as it satisfies its core one) and to create a communal experience that is in some ways akin to movies or popular music in its accessibility.

Some recent successes have included Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a concrete cast of the interior of a London terrace house; Mark Wallinger’s 1999 “Ecce Homo,” a life-size figure of Jesus crowned with thorns, hands bound, standing amid the din of Trafalgar Square in London; Takashi Murakami’s wicked aluminum and platinum leaf Buddha shown in the atrium of the IBM Building in New York in the spring; and Anish Kapoor’s abstract “Cloud Gate,” nicknamed the Bean, at Millennium Park in Chicago. Freely mixing elements of Pop, Minimalism, conceptual art and realism, these pieces also often benefit from new technologies and materials that make them dynamic and provocative. (Jean Dubuffet’s giant, cartoony “Group of Four Trees,” at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza in Lower Manhattan, is a marvelous, unsung ancestor, but then it arrived in 1972, when sculpture was in an uproar.)

Certain artists may do their best work in the public arena. The Kapoor Bean’s giant, mercurylike dollop of brilliantly polished steel gives the phrase plop art robust new life and converts this artist’s sometimes glib involvement with reflective surfaces into an enveloping experience both humorous and almost sublime. From outside, the Bean’s curving exterior casts distorted reflections of its world — plaza, sky, city, people — back at us. It makes itself seem larger than it is by making us seem smaller, but its distortions change with every step we take, tilting the world this way and that, as if the universe were slightly adrift.

Beneath the sculpture is an arched space the size of a small chapel. Here the curving surface of the piece reflects itself, creating a dark violet cloudiness except at the highest point, which is reflection free. This small gleaming circle of silvery steel suggests a Baroque occulus letting in light; it has all the mysterious illusionism of a hole-in-the-roof church ceiling painted by Correggio but restated in modern, nondenominational terms.

No one has been more important to the revival of public art than Jeff Koons, contemporary sculpture’s genius lightweight, whose up-and-down, hellbent-on-perfection career is the subject of an illuminating if rather crowded survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was Mr. Koons’s giant “Puppy” — a West Highland terrier covered with dirt, planted densely with flowers and first shown 16 years ago — that broadcast most loudly and clearly that public sculpture was neither an exhausted form nor necessarily a dumbed-down one.

“Puppy” was well placed and well timed. It stood in the courtyard of a handsome, mustard-colored Baroque palace that framed it perfectly. It was June 1992, and a few miles away, in the German city of Kassel, the international megashow “Documenta 9” was opening. Scores of art-world denizens made the short schlep to Arolsen to see what Mr. Koons was up to.

What they found was a shocking simplicity, accessibility and pleasure. “Puppy” was intensely lovable, triggering a laugh-out-loud delight that expanded your sense of the human capacity for joy. It was a familiar, sentimental cliché revived with an extravagant purity, not with enduring materials like marble or bronze but with nature at its most colorful and fragile. The flowery semblance of fur made “Puppy” almost living flesh, like us.

The sculpture could also be read as a redemptive gesture, a kind of mea culpa after the sexually explicit harshness of Mr. Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series, exhibited the previous year at galleries in New York, Brussels and Lausanne, Switzerland. Four of these paintings hang in the Chicago show behind a wall flanked by dire parental warnings, showing them to be almost anti-public compared with most of his subsequent work.

“Puppy” also provided a karmic bookend for an occurrence that happened almost exactly three years before its Arolsen debut: the removal, in March 1989, of Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” from the plaza at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. The dismantling came after a court ruling, complaints by the people who worked in the building — they hated the Serra — and days of acrimonious public hearings overseen by the General Services Administration.

“Tilted Arc” was in many ways the dark before the dawn not only of the Koons “Puppy,” but also of the shining achievement of Mr. Serra’s post-Arc work. He has in essence taken his revenge on the public by making stronger, more elaborate pieces that it could not resist — judging from how people line up these days to walk through his torqued ellipses, spirals and arcs.

The “Puppy” set a high standard that Mr. Koons reached again only with his recent works in gleaming high chromium stainless steel, especially his big hatched egg and his prim yet erotic “Balloon Dog” sculptures. The dogs imbue a greatly enlarged child’s party toy with the tensed stillness of an archaic Greek horse while subtly evoking various bodily orifices and protrusions. “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” is on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it draws crowds, functions as a photo op and yet retains its dignity. “Balloon Dog (Orange)” is among the Chicago survey’s high points.

That show is almost a primer of dos and don’ts in public sculpture. The best of its 60 pieces have the same irresistibility of “Puppy”: you are drawn to them by their familiarity only to realize that they are unprecedented.

Spanning from 1979 to 2007, it has been organized by Francesco Bonami, the museum’s former senior curator, and is the most comprehensive museum survey of Mr. Koons’s career. It reveals an artist whose work has proceeded in fits and starts and has improved as it has shed its often abstruse conceptual, not so vaguely Scientological story line.

Mr. Koons’s theme is transformation, enacted literally with familiar restated objects in uncharacteristic material or scale. It is a basic Pop Art strategy but much easier to pull off on canvas than in sculpture, where it requires a level of perfection, the pursuit of which has, at times, nearly brought Mr. Koons’s art to a standstill.

The show demonstrates that his work has constantly returned to notions of weightlessness, floatation and levitation, often conflated with innocence, and that his progress has to some extent been a matter of getting his elaborate sculptural chops together. He broached weightlessness from the start, first with simple Duchampian ready-mades: plastic inflatable flowers and bunnies; vacuum cleaners set aglow by fluorescent light tubes and sealed in Plexiglas cases; and finally basketballs afloat, embryolike, in aquariums. In Chicago it is a little startling to see how much of middle-period Koons — the late 1980s bronze casts of an aqualung and life raft, the stainless-steel casts of portrait busts, a Baccarat decanter set or a miniature train (also liquor decanters) so central to his early reputation — now seems inert, heavy with irony, kitschy obviousness and sheer material. The most overt sign of the Koons to come is “Rabbit,” the 1986 stainless steel cast of an inflatable bunny that joins weightlessness and reflectivity and remains his best-known work.

Mr. Koons’s art enacts the basic exchange of public sculpture. We literally see ourselves in his alluring reflective surfaces; his buoyant forms reach deep into our childhood with its feelings of hope and optimism. At the moment his biggest projects include an enormous public sculpture commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which, echoing his stainless steel liquor train, will involve a locomotive suspended from a crane. He also has a show at Versailles opening Sept. 10 that could build on the felicitous placement of the Arolsen “Puppy.”

Ever since Jasper Johns’s flags and targets pointedly addressed the viewer with “things the mind already knows,” much, maybe most art has set out one way or another to reach a broader audience more directly. The welter of strategies began simply enough, with the elimination of the sculpture’s pedestal and the siphoning of images from pop culture, and it now extends to the Internet. The revival of public sculpture is perhaps only the latest ripple in this continuing wave, but it is also the most public. Its manifestations are out there and easy to find.

December 9, 2012

Treasures That Sprang From Rustic Necessity

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

LONDON — There is the leg of an Ancient Egyptian throne, an ornate 1730s cabinet thought to have belonged to the satirist Jonathan Swift and early 20th-century gems by Eileen Gray and Marcel Breuer, but one of the most intriguing treasures in the new Furniture Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum is a simple wooden and straw chair with rather humbler origins.

It is one of the Orkney chairs, which were designed and made in the late 1800s and early 1900s by David Kirkness, an unusually skillful and enterprising joiner working on the remote Orkney Islands near the northern tip of Scotland. By refining the design of the seating that local farmers and fishermen had made for centuries, Kirkness sold thousands of chairs all over the world, to royalty, politicians and artists, like Augustus John, who once owned the chair now displayed at the V&A. Ingenious though Kirkness was, his chairs might not have become so popular without the help of an eccentric local philanthropist and champion of Scottish craftsmanship, George Hunter MacThomas Thoms. Together, they turned something that had sprung from poverty into a sought-after artifact steeped in the romanticism of rustic life and the desolate beauty of the Orkney Islands.

Design history is rich with examples of useful, occasionally indispensable objects made by unknown designers using whichever tools and materials happened to be available. The original Orkney chairs are typical, having been made by the poorest inhabitants of an archipelago of some 70 chilly, windy islands at the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea. So few trees survive there that, for centuries, the Orcadians (as the islanders are called) had to make furniture from driftwood and the straw left over from growing oats to feed themselves and their livestock. The straw was secured with a tough grass that they twisted into string. Some of the chairs had high, rounded woven straw backs, which shielded their occupants from icy draughts, often with wooden drawers tucked beneath the seats to store knitting, tobacco or whisky.

Most Orcadians had no choice but to make their own chairs, but the more affluent islanders bought them from local craftsmen like Kirkness, whose father and grandfather were also joiners. During the 1870s, he opened a workshop in Kirkwall, the largest town on the Orkney Islands, initially running it with his brother William. They made a range of wooden objects there, including coffins: Like many joiners of that era, they doubled as undertakers. But by the 1880s Kirkness was recognized for his skill at making traditional chairs.

Among his customers was the ebullient Thoms, whose official role was sheriff of Orkney, Caithness and Zetland.

Having bought one chair from Kirkness, he ordered another in early 1890, explaining that he planned to display them both at a forthcoming exhibition of Scottish goods in Edinburgh. The design historian Annette Carruthers has traced their relationship through their correspondence. After some bickering over whether the new chair should have a drawer (Kirkness wanted one, but Thoms didn’t), it was dispatched to Edinburgh. In June 1890, Kirkness received a

letter from Thoms congratulating him on “a rare piece of good fortune” when a large order arrived from Liberty, a London department store popular with the then-fashionable Arts and Crafts movement.

More orders followed, and Kirkness increased production. He imported wood, mostly oak and pine, from Aberdeen for the frames, but continued to use locally grown straw and grass. The wooden components were made in his workshop, and the straw backs woven by outworkers spread across the islands, some of whom worked for him at night after finishing their day jobs on the land or out at sea. Even so, Kirkness often struggled to meet the demand for his chairs.

By the late 1890s, he had found a solution by devising four design templates, each for a different style of chair: a large hooded one with a drawer; two slightly smaller chairs with optional drawers, one for men, the other for women; and a child’s chair. By standardizing the designs, Kirkness simplified the production process, thereby speeding it up and improving quality control.

His design strategy was identical to that of the late 19th-century industrialists who were manufacturing thousands of identical objects in their factories, but few of his customers knew that. At a turbulent time when people were nostalgic about disappearing rustic rituals, the idea of traditionally styled furniture made by local people using authentic materials and techniques in so remote a place as the Orkney Islands seemed alluringly romantic.

Sentimentality aside, Kirkness’s chairs were impressive in other respects. “The shape is unusual, as is the combination of materials,” said Christopher Wilk, keeper of furniture, textiles and fashion at the V&A. “Similar chairs appeared in other Scottish islands, but because of Kirkness’s designs they came to be closely associated with Orkney. His chairs aren’t too polished, and have the honesty of objects made simply by hand. You can see the screws holding the wooden parts together and the way the straw was woven and sewn on to the frames. That’s very appealing.”

So appealing that, by Kirkness’s death in 1936, he had produced some 14,000 Orkney chairs. His business survived him only to close during World War II before being revived in 1956 by Reynold Eunson, who bought the workshop and its contents, including Kirkness’s design templates, and rehired some of his employees.

Similar chairs are still made in workshops throughout the Orkney Islands today, and Kirkness’s own chairs are greatly prized by collectors. The V&A had long wanted to acquire one for its collection, but was deterred by the profusion of fake “Kirknesses.”

“He put paper labels on his chairs, and didn’t glue them on very well,” said Mr. Wilk. “But last year, a pair of Kirkness chairs from Augustus John’s studio came up for auction, and we bought them. In one of the drawers, there was a book about Scottish folk songs. Wonderful. You could see exactly why John had bought that chair.”

MAY 27, 2009, 9:40 AM

Historic Architecture vs. Clean Energy

By KATE GALBRAITH Preservationists are debating the merits of solar panels or other green features on historic buildings, according to Mark Huck, a restoration architect in California's Office of Historic Preservation who contacted Green Inc. after seeing my post on homeowners associations blocking solar panels.

"Most sustainable energy conservation efforts are very compatible and complement historic buildings," Mr. Huck wrote. "P.V. installation on a visible roof is one of the few exceptions."

Mr. Huck was referring to photovoltaic panels that generate electricity from the sun. He said, as well, that California's Solar Rights Act limits the restrictions that various groups can place on solar panel installations.

In a fascinating speech, Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for The Chicago Tribune, cites several examples of green improvements to historic buildings running into conflict with preservationist priorities.

In the case of a Wisconsin cottage designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the state's governor got involved, according to Mr. Kamin, after a historic preservation officer rejected an effort to double-glaze the windows so that the house would stay warmer.

The debate has been aired in historic parts of the South.

In Atlanta, a homeowner's effort to put a 45-foot wind turbine beside his house, in a historic district, drew ire from neighbors who were worried about home values.

"It's unattractive and it's a nuisance," one neighbor told CNN. Even Al Gore, the green guru, had trouble putting solar panels on his more-than-70-year-old Nashville home. The city of Belle Meade initially rejected his request to add panels, according to The Associated Press. Later, however, it passed new rules to allow Mr. Gore to proceed with the installation -- provided the panels were out of sight of neighbors.

The preservation community needs to articulate more clearly where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable green improvements, said Carl Elephante, the director for sustainable design at the architecture firm Quinn Evans.

"Mount Vernon is clearly a place where 'touch not a hair on this old gray head' - there's nothing you can do there that wouldn't interfere with the historic setting," said Mr. Elefante.

However, in dealing with historic townhouses in places like Washington, D.C., or New York, "there's obviously a great deal more flexibility," he said.

Mr. Elefante also said that preservationists had added mechanical and lighting systems to many historic buildings, potentially ensuring that they "remain fossil fuel addicted for all times."

"As stewards of those buildings, we need a new paradigm," he said.

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010, 10:47 AM

When Green Building Is Not Green Enough

By TOM ZELLER JR. As I mentioned in Sunday's Times, the nation's building stock plays a bigger role in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions than many Americans might realize -- accounting for as much as 40 percent of primary energy use, 70 percent of electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Why? Well, one reason, according to Laura Briggs, a professor of architecture, interior design and lighting at Parsons the New School for Design, is that for most of the 20th century, the architecture and design world has remained quite separate from engineering.

"The main hurdle to seeing more energy-efficient building is a lack of knowledge," she said in an interview last summer. "We've done a really bad job as educators in linking building sciences with architectural aesthetics."

In other words, while American architects are well schooled in matters of design, they often receive little training in the physics of how a structure breathes, how it consumes energy and how best to elevate its overall efficiency.

This is changing, of course, as evidenced by the budding forest of "green" building standards and certifications on the market, from the United States Green Building Council's LEED for Homes point system to what is arguably the most recognizable label for many Americans: the federal government's own Energy Star program.

Indeed, more than 1 million Energy Star qualified homes, which consume at least 15 percent less energy than conventional construction, have now been built in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, which jointly administer the program.

That might sound good, but advocates of more aggressive building protocols like the passive house standard, which aims for homes that use up to 80 percent less energy overall than conventional construction, say the lack of ambitious targets may actually be hindering the effort to address pressing problems like global warming.

"If everybody keeps building to the Energy Star standard, just meeting that, we're not going to solve our global problems, and our buildings are not going to be ultimately reducing our impact on the environment," said Peter Schneider, a project manager with the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, a nonprofit charged with administering the state's efficiency programs. Mr. Schneider was on hand to administer the preliminary blower-door test on the Landau house, the passive house that I profiled on Sunday.

"What we need to be doing," Mr. Schneider said, "is what passive-house is doing."

November 3, 2012

Protecting the City, Before Next Time

By ALAN FEUER

Arriving in Venice years ago, Robert Benchley, the New York journalist and wit, is said to have sent a mock-panicked telegram to his editor: “Streets flooded. Please advise.”

After the enormous storm last week, which genuinely panicked New York with its staggering and often fatal violence, residents here could certainly identify with the first line of Benchley’s note. But what about the second?

If, as climate experts say, sea levels in the region have not only gradually increased, but are also likely to get higher as time goes by, then the question is: What is the way forward? Does the city continue to build ever-sturdier and everhigher sea walls? Or does it accept the uncomfortable idea that parts of New York will occasionally flood and that the smarter method is to make the local infrastructure more elastic and better able to recover?

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday gave a sea wall the nod. Because of the recent history of powerful storms hitting the area, he said, elected officials have a responsibility to consider new and innovative plans to prevent similar damage in the future. “Climate change is a reality,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Given the frequency of these extreme weather

situations we have had, for us to sit here today and say this is once in a generation and it’s not going to happen again, I think would be shortsighted.”

But some experts in the field who have thought deeply about how to protect New York from huge storms like Hurricane Sandy — and especially from the coastal surges they produce — suggested that less intrusive forms of socalled soft infrastructure might prove more effective in sheltering the city than mammoth Venetian sea walls. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seemed to agree with them on Thursday when he said: “I don’t think there’s any practical way to build barriers in the oceans. Even if you spent a fortune, it’s not clear to me that you would get much value for it.”

According to the experts — architects, environmentalists and civil engineers — large-scale projects like underwater gates are expensive, cumbersome and difficult to build. More important, they say, such undertakings are binary projects that work just fine until the moment they do not.

Whatever the way forward, Klaus H. Jacob, a Columbia University seismologist and an expert on urban environmental disasters, said the century-event of Hurricane Sandy could become, because of rising seas alone, an annual occurrence by 2100.

“We know what we have to do,” said Dr. Jacob, who predicted last week’s tragedy with eerily prescient detail in a 2011 report. “The question is when do we get beyond talking and get to action.”

Among those actions already proposed are relatively minor alterations to the building code, to ban housing boilers and electrical systems in basements, and slightly more apocalyptic strategies, like one known as managed retreat, in which people would cede low-lying areas to the sea. While no one is calling for a mass and permanent exodus from the Rockaways, for instance, some experts, like Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia University, said that as parts of New York became more difficult — and costly — to protect, managed retreat needed at least to become “part of the public discussion.”

Here, then, are three proposals — some traditional, some fantastic, but all at least theoretically workable — designed to reduce the effects of storms like Hurricane Sandy on three especially vulnerable New York neighborhoods: Lower Manhattan, the Red Hook and Gowanus sections of Brooklyn, and the northern shore of Staten Island.

Lower Manhattan Marshy Edges, Absorptive Streets Picture a fringe of mossy wetlands strapped like a beard to Lower Manhattan’s chin, and you are halfway toward imagining the plan to protect the financial district and its environs dreamed up by the architect Stephen Cassell and a team from his firm, Architecture Research Office, and a partner firm, dlandstudio.

“Our goal was to design a more resilient city,” Mr. Cassell said. “We may not always be able to keep the water out, so we wanted to improve the edges and the streets of the city to deal with flooding in a more robust way.”

Among the most disturbing images to emerge from the aftermath of the storm was that of a pile of cars floating upended in the waters of a parking lot near Wall Street. Lower Manhattan, where most of the borough’s power failures occurred, is vulnerable to floods like this not just because it sits low in relation to the sea; it also juts out on heaps of artificial landfill, into the fickle waters of New York Harbor. It is probably not coincidental that the flooded areas of Manhattan, largely correspond to the island’s prelandfill borders.

To prevent incursions by water, Mr. Cassell and his planners imagined ringing Lower Manhattan with a grassy network of land-based parks accompanied by watery patches of wetlands and tidal salt marshes. At Battery Park, for instance, the marshes would weave through a series of breakwater islands made of geo-textile tubes and covered with marine plantings. On the Lower East Side of the island, Mr. Cassell and his team envisioned extending Manhattan by a block or two — with additional landfill — to create space for another new park and a salt marsh.

Beyond serving as recreation areas, these engineered green spaces would sop up and reduce the force of incoming water.

“When there’s a storm surge, it creates an enormous amount of energy,” Mr. Cassell said. “Wetlands absorb that energy and protect the coastline.”

As a complement to the parks and marshes, Mr. Cassell’s team would re-engineer the streets in the neighborhood to make the area better able to handle surging waves, creating three variations of roadway. On so-called Level 1 streets, asphalt would be replaced with absorptive materials, like porous concrete, to soak up excess water like a sponge and to irrigate plantings in the street bed. Level 2 streets, planned for stronger surges, would send running water into the marshes at the island’s edges and also into prepositioned ponds meant to collect runoff for dry spells. Level 3 streets — the only ones that might require a shift in the current city grid — would be parallel to the shoreline and designed to drain surging water back into the harbor.

“We weren’t fully going back to nature with our plan,” Mr. Cassell said. “We thought of it more as engineered ecology.

But if you look at the history of Manhattan, we have pushed nature off the island and replaced it with man-made infrastructure. What we can do is start to reintegrate things and make the city more durable.”

Red Hook and Gowanus Oysters to the Rescue The architect and landscape designer Kate Orff based her plan to shield the Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn on the outsize powers of the oyster. “The era of big infrastructure is over,” Ms. Orff said. By placing her faith

in a palm-size bivalve to reduce the effects of surging storms, Ms. Orff said, she is “blending urbanism and ecology” and also “looking to the past to reimagine the future.”

Red Hook, in particular, was thrashed by Hurricane Sandy as some of the local inlets, like the Buttermilk Channel and Gowanus Bay, spilled into the low-lying area, swamping public housing projects and sending water rushing so high through the streets it occasionally swallowed up cars and bicycles.

Ms. Orff’s proposal., created by a team at her design firm Scape/Landscape Architecture P.L.L.C., envisions a system of artificial reefs in the channel and the bay built out of rocks, shells and fuzzy rope that is intended to nurture the growth of oysters (she calls them “nature’s wave attenuators”).

The Bay Ridge Flats, a stretch of water that sits off the coast of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was once home to a small archipelago of islands that protected the Brooklyn coastline. The islands have long since disappeared because of dredging, and Ms. Orff would replace them with her oyster-studded barriers, which, over time, would form a sort of “ecological glue” and mitigate onrushing tides, she said.

At the same time, she imagines installing oyster beds along the banks of the Gowanus Canal in a series of what are known as Floating Upweller Systems (Flupsys) — essentially, artificial shellfish nurseries. A powerful fan blows aerated water through a group of eight chambers in which oysters or mussels can be grown. The chambers protect the budding oysters from predators like starfish. Above the Flupsys, Ms. Orff would place a public walkway for joggers and strollers, punctured every so often by hatches that could be lifted to permit a view of the nature below.

“This is infrastructure that we can do now,” she explained. “It’s not something we have to think about and fund with billions of dollars 50 years down the road.”

Oysters have the added benefit of acting as natural water filters — a single one can clean up to 50 gallons of water a day. By being placed in the Gowanus Canal, Ms. Orff hopes, they could further purify what has already been named a federal Superfund site. She wants, by way of her project, to change how we think about infrastructure projects.

“Infrastructure isn’t separate from us, or it shouldn’t be,” Ms. Orff said. “It’s among us, it’s next to us, embedded in our cities and our public spaces.”

Staten Island A Bridge in Troubled Waters A few years ago, Lawrence J. Murphy, an engineer in the New York office of the global engineering firm CDM Smith, was asked by the local chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers to propose a way of protecting northern Staten Island from the forces of a Category 3 hurricane. He came up with a plan to build a classic storm-surge barrier

across the Arthur Kill, the tidal strait that separates Staten Island from the mainland of New Jersey, designed to act in concert with similar barriers in the East River, the Narrows and the waters near the Rockaway Peninsula.

Staten Island was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, as entire neighborhoods were flooded, a 168-foot water tanker crashed onshore and city officials said that most of the fatalities in the city occurred there. It is arguably New York’s most exposed borough, surrounded not by peaceful rivers but by oceanic channels like the Arthur Kill and, of course, the Atlantic itself.

Mr. Murphy’s concept, created with his partner, Thomas Schoettle, calls for the construction of a damlike structure with suspension towers spanning the Arthur Kill. Tidal gates below the surface would open and close as needed.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, Category 3 hurricanes (Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 storm, downgraded by the time it reached New York) would produce surges of slightly more than 14 feet above normal sea levels. Mr. Murphy designed his barrier to protect against “overtopping waves” of an additional 8 feet, for a total height of 22 feet. He also designed a complex system of locks and drawbridges to accommodate the numerous commercial ships that navigate the kill.

Mr. Murphy’s barrier would be run by a trained staff and would operate on emergency power in the event of an electrical failure. Because strong tides pass through the kill, he would also outfit the barrier with tidal generators, which, as an extra benefit, could produce electricity.

Nor did Mr. Murphy ignore the possibilities of public recreation. “The concept design of the Arthur Kill Storm Barrier has been made with a focus on aesthetics to create a destination,” he wrote in his proposal. “The multiuse path can provide bicycling and walking opportunities. Fishing and bird-watching amenities can also be provided.”

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July 17, 2011

MoMA Exhibit Shows How Technology Is Getting the Point Across

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

LONDON — When Tony Quan, an American graffiti artist known by the tag name TEMPT1, contracted amyotropic lateral sclerosis, an often fatal form of motor neurone disease, his condition deteriorated rapidly until he was paralyzed except for his eyes. A group of friends from the Free Art & Technology laboratory, Graffiti Research Lab and other art and technology organizations joined forces to try to find ways of enabling him to continue his work.

The result was EyeWriter. The team fitted eye-tracking technology to a cheap pair of eyeglasses together with specially developed software that records Mr. Quan’s eye movements and relays them wirelessly to a laptop computer placed near to the wall that is to be tagged. The laptop is connected to a laser-tagging kit that paints graffiti on to the wall in the shapes and colors specified by Mr. Quan, even though he is lying miles away on a hospital bed.

EyeWriter is one of the projects featured in “Talk to Me,” an exhibition opening July 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to explore how innovations in communication design are transforming our lives. The premise of the show is simple: that communication is now the dominant force in design.

“We went through so many changes in the definition of design in the 20th century with all the clichés about form following function, and the addition of meaning in the 1960s with post-structuralism, but what is really important right now is communication,” Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, said by telephone.

She co-curated the exhibition with a colleague, Kate Carmody. “Because of that designers can’t just think in terms of form, function and meaning when they develop new objects, they have to learn a bit of script writing too.”

MoMA has a proud history of staging manifesto shows that have identified emerging issues in design. During the 1930s, the architect Philip Johnson set a new standard of design curation in exhibitions, which analyzed industrial objects with a level of criticality that art museums like MoMA had traditionally reserved for painting and sculpture. A more populist approach was adopted in the 1940s and 1950s, when another MoMA curator, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., embarked on a crusade to educate post-war American consumers about the virtues of “good design.”

More recently, Ms. Antonelli has perpetuated the tradition by organizing a series of shows that have addressed design’s role in the digital age, culminating in “Design and the Elastic Mind” (2008), which examined the rapidly changing relationship of design, science and technology. A passionate champion of design, she produces exhibitions that are provocative, ambitious, and inherently optimistic about design’s ability to enhance our lives, without ignoring

the problems posed by its expeditions into new terrain. Her shows are as likely to include esoteric student experiments and seemingly nutty concepts as the polished products of corporate research programs.

“Talk to Me” is no exception. The starting point is that digital technology is enabling objects to become so complex and powerful that we now expect to interact with them. If you hand an unfamiliar object to a small child, he or she will instinctively search for buttons or sensors to operate it.

Though the same same microchips that enable things as small as smart phones to fulfill hundreds of different functions also make them more opaque. In the industrial era when form generally followed function, you could guess how to use an electronic product from its appearance. You can’t do that with a tiny digital device, which is why designers face the new challenge that Ms. Antonelli calls “script writing,” in other words, ensuring that the object can tell us how to use it.

The exhibits in “Talk to Me” range from cash and ticket machines that are used by millions of people every day at banks, airports, railway and bus stations, to inspired guerilla projects like the prosthetic “smiles” intended to empower anyone who feels awkward socially and a version of the Rubik’s Cube inscribed with Braille symbols so people with poor sight can play with it.

Another exhibit is a proposal to improve the efficiency of a 911 emergency command center by redesigning the way the information appears on its employees’ computer screens to make it easier for them to understand what is happening, how to respond and to check whether the chosen solution is working properly.

Other exhibits explore new forms of communication. There are dazzling examples of new technologies including data visualizations, the digital imagery that not only makes sense of huge quantities of complex information, but instantly reflects any changes. The show also features more idiosyncratic media, such as “Pig 05049,” a book that tracks what happened to the components of a single pig after its death as they were used to make beer, bullets, anti-freeze, heart valves and chocolate as well as bacon, sausages and the book’s own cover.

In the spirit of practicing what they are preaching, Ms. Antonelli and Ms. Carmody have experimented with new communication techniques in the planning and presentation of “Talk to Me.” The curatorial process of researching and selecting exhibits was recorded on an open source Web site, which is still live at wp.moma.org/talk_to_me. They have also added Quick Response tags, containing barcodes, to the labels of exhibits inside the show and to the relevant pages of the catalog. To learn more about an exhibit, you swipe the tag with a QR-reading application on a smart phone or computer, which leads you to a special section of MoMA’s Web site.

Exhilarating though “Talk to Me” promises to be, it has a familiar subtext in some of the problems it anticipates for the new wave of communication designers. “There is still an imbalance between the aesthetic value of some projects

and their functional value, and designers need to make much more effort to explain what they are doing,” Ms. Antonelli said. “This field is moving so fast, but we are still dealing with the old clichés and still adding new ones.”

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December 30, 2011

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.

Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops.

And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

Many growers and even environmental groups in Mexico defend the export-driven organic farming, even as they acknowledge that more than a third of the aquifers in southern Baja are categorized as overexploited by the Mexican water authority. With sophisticated irrigation systems and shade houses, they say, farmers are becoming more skilled at conserving water. They are focusing new farms in “microclimates” near underexploited aquifers, such as in the shadow of a mountain, said Fernando Frías, a water specialist with the environmental group Pronatura Noroeste.

They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession.

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Experts agree that in general organic farms tend to be less damaging to the environment than conventional farms. In the past, however, “organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case,” said Michael Bomford, a scientist at Kentucky State University who specializes in sustainable agriculture. He added that intense organic agriculture had also put stress on aquifers in California.

Some organic standard setters are beginning to refine their criteria so that organic products better match their natural ideals. Krav, a major Swedish organic certification program, allows produce grown in greenhouses to carry its “organic” label only if the buildings use at least 80 percent renewable fuel, for example. And last year the Agriculture

Department’s National Organic Standards Board revised its rules to require that for an “organic milk” label, cows had to be at least partly fed by grazing in open pastures rather than standing full time in feedlots.

But each decision to narrow the definition of “organic” involves an inevitable tug-of-war among farmers, food producers, supermarkets and environmentalists. While the United States’ regulations for organic certification require that growers use practices that protect water resources, it is hard to define a specific sustainable level of water use for a single farm “because aquifer depletion is the result of many farmers’ overutilizing the resource,” said Miles McEvoy, head of the National Organic Program at the Agriculture Department.

While the original organic ideal was to eat only local, seasonal produce, shoppers who buy their organics at supermarkets, from Whole Foods to Walmart, expect to find tomatoes in December and are very sensitive to price.

Both factors stoke the demand for imports. Few areas in the United States can farm organic produce in the winter without resorting to energy-guzzling hothouses. In addition, American labor costs are high. Day laborers who come to pick tomatoes in this part of Baja make about $10 a day, nearly twice the local minimum wage. Tomato pickers in Florida may earn $80 a day in high season.

Manuel Verdugo, 42, began organic tomato farming on desert land in San José del Cabo five years ago and now owns 30 acres in several locations. Each week he sends two and a half tons of cherry, plum and beefsteak tomatoes to the United States under the brand name Tiky Cabo.

He has invested in irrigation systems that drip water directly onto plants’ roots rather than channeling it through open canals. He is building large shade houses that cover his crops to keep out pests and minimize evaporation. Even so, he cannot farm 10 acres in the nearby hamlet of La Cuenca because the wells there are dry.

At another five-year-old organic farm, Rosario Castillo says he can cultivate only 19 acres of the 100 he has earmarked for organic production, although he dug a well seven months ago to gain better access to the aquifer. The authorities ration pumping and have not granted him permission to clear native cactuses. “We have very little water here, and you have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to get it,” Mr. Castillo said.

Many growers blame tourist development — hotels and golf courses — for the water scarcity, and this has been a major problem in coastal areas. But farming can also be a significant drain. According to one study in an area of northern Baja called Ojos Negros, a boom in the planting of green onions for export a decade ago lowered the water table by about 16 inches a year. “They were pumping a lot of groundwater, and that was making some people rich on both sides of the border at the expense of the environment,” said Victor Miguel Ponce, a professor of hydrology at San Diego State University.

The logistics of getting water and transporting large volumes of perishable produce favors bigger producers. Some of the largest are American-owned, like Sueño Tropical, a vast farm with rows of shade houses lined up in the desert that caters exclusively to the American market.

While traditional organic farmers saw a blemish or odd shape simply as nature’s variations, workers at Sueño Tropical are instructed to cull tomatoes that do not meet the uniform shape, size and cosmetic requirement of clients like Whole Foods. Those “seconds” are sold locally.

Yet the connection to the United States has brought other kinds of benefits. Del Cabo Cooperative, which serves as a broker for hundreds of local farmers, provides seeds for its Mexican growers and hires roving agronomists and entomologists to assist them in tending their crops without chemicals. As the American market expands, said John Graham, a coordinator of operations at Del Cabo, he is always looking to bring new growers into his network — especially those whose farms draw on distant aquifers where water is still abundant.

David Agren contributed reporting.

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May 18, 2011

At the Furniture Fair, Sustainable Furniture Gets Playful

By JULIE LASKY

THE table lamp is laid-back, and no wonder. Created by Peter Stathis, a San Francisco industrial designer, for Joby, a San Francisco consumer products company, Trapeze has the easygoing affect of a Bay Area windsurfer on a fair-trade coffee break.

But don’t be fooled by its relaxed demeanor. Trapeze has a serious side — it’s good for the environment, too.

Introduced at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which ended on Tuesday, the lamp has 102 LEDs embedded in its ultra-thin head; a diffuser softens and spreads the light so that it resembles the warmth of (boo, hiss) incandescent bulbs. Another bit of patent-pending wizardry allows Trapeze to bend like a Cirque du Soleil gymnast because no wires run through its jolly, bulbous joints. The current somehow manages to flow anyway.

At the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, where the furniture fair is held every May, and in concurrent design events throughout the city, playfulness mingled with social responsibility, and sometimes overshadowed it.

Among the more than 500 exhibitors from 39 countries, the green conversation hadn’t faded by any means, but it was less strident, better integrated into the ambient hum of the new.

This fair showed that objects as banal as recycling containers, stepladders, fruit crates and old potatoes can have flair.

At the Javits Center, Catherine Mui, a designer based in Hong Kong, showed her GO recycling bin, its compartments topped with sculptures of a bottle, can and carton to assist in sorting.

Among the items at “Use Me,” the American Design Club exhibition in NoHo, was Step, a ladder by Iacoli & McAllister, of Seattle, inspired by models from the 1920s, except that it had pink-painted oak treads and was priced at $1,195, so it probably won’t be left to rot in the garage. (It’s sustainable the way emerald brooches are.)

Hannu Kahonen’s Fruit Box chair, on display at a Finnish design exhibition in the meatpacking district, challenged consumers who presumably have mastered Ikea furniture to assemble their own seating from recycled planks lashed together with linen cord.

And at “Model Citizens,” a design show at the Chelsea Art Museum, the Dutch designer Juliette Warmenhoven’s Potato Music Box, part of her Everyday Growing collection, turned a sprouting potato into a centerpiece. The music box, constructed by hand of paper dipped in plastic, displayed the potato on a rotating pedestal, flaunting its underappreciated charms.

Once the grim, chastising superego of product design, sustainability has become delightful. And it no longer calls attention to itself as insistently as it once did. Trove, the Brooklyn wallpaper company, has begun applying its delicate, nature-themed prints to wallcoverings made with calcium carbonate, the stuff of marble and limestone; the texture of the material offers little evidence of its provenance, although a sample was suspiciously heavy and cool.

Randall Buck, a founder of Trove, said the stone-based wallcoverings are breathable, antimicrobial, degradable (into dust) and easier to hang than conventional wallpaper because they don’t expand and contract when paste is applied.

Another virtue, Mr. Buck pointed out, is that while “paper wants to turn yellow,” stone is content to remain its original color.

Sustainability has traditionally created aesthetic challenges, leading to products made in regrettable shades of oatmeal, but designers at this year’s fair positively embraced those hurdles. At the booth representing Rhode Island School of Design’s furniture department, students working with Twintex, a recyclable Owens Corning-manufactured composite of glass and polypropylene, described the medieval tools they used to turn the material into hairy-looking tables, chairs and lamps. For Eun Sang Ernie Lee, the author of an armchair composed of crimped waves of fiber, the instruments were giant knitting needles; a system of aluminum rods and clips to produce the perm; and a kiln to bake the chair into stability.

How big were the needles? “Two inches in diameter,” Mr. Lee estimated. Other students jumped in to correct him, making circles of three and four inches with their fingers.

One designer even buried the sustainability story. Immersed in a discussion of the spine that provides flexibility for a chair called I Would Do Backsprings 4 You, Daniel Moyer of Brooklyn neglected to mention the source of the wood that made up the rest of his piece. Only eventually did he reveal that it came from “the branch of a black walnut tree that fell down in Pennsylvania in the ice storm of 2008.” Five or 10 years ago, anecdotes like that were breaking news in the design industry. Today, one has to beg for them.

As the RISD students and Mr. Moyer both demonstrated, conversations about sustainability in design frequently turn to craft. Both areas have gained momentum in the past decade with heightened concerns about the fate of the planet.

Limited-edition hand-wrought pieces tend to be treasured by their owners rather than discarded in landfills. They also consume fewer resources than their factory-made counterparts, and are more likely to be produced by loving hands.

One of the fair’s most remarkable objects in this genre didn’t look like craft at all, but an ebullient work of industrial design. The Bulldozer Lounge, a stocky aluminum-composite chair lined in neoprene that resembles a caterpillar (as well as a Caterpillar), is the first production piece by Mark Goetz, a New York designer, and Efe Buluc, a designer based in Istanbul, who have been working together off and on since 1997.

“We wanted it to be animated and playful,” Mr. Goetz said, adding that his 7-year-old son is bursting with pride in his accomplishment. There is nothing toylike, however, about the $12,000 price of the made-to-order chair.

The altruism of craft was a theme of several projects, among them Espacio Sami Hayek’s collection of objects made from Barro Negro, a clay native to Oaxaca, Mexico, that gets its sheen through smoking rather than glazing. The studio’s tableware and furniture in this material are produced by a Mexican artisans’ collective that employs local

workers. Similarly, Bow Bins, rattan-and-recycled-plastic baskets designed by Cordula Kehrer of Germany for the New York City company Areaware, help support the Aeta people of the Philippines, who weave them.

Other craftspeople were busy demonstrating their skill. Over the course of the fair, the storefront of the Future Perfect, in NoHo, was occupied by Matt Gagnon, of Glendale, Calif., who built lamp prototypes out of aluminum pieces that he assembled into armatures and wrapped with different kinds of fibers. The Boston designer Debra Folz passed time at her display at the “Model Citizens” show in Chelsea needlepointing the mesh top of a metal bench. And “Wanted,” an exhibition of international design nearby, offered a demonstration of gilding.

Summer is nearly upon us, but knitting fever shows no sign of letting up. The New York artist Olek has won admirers by crocheting wrappings for every object in a studio apartment, and designers are also making sweaters for things insensible to cold. The Future Perfect displayed small flasks that the New Yorker Lara Knutson had clothed in a glassy knitted yarn, while at the Javits Center, Esque Studio of Portland, Ore., showed hanging lamps with white pullovers, like little pear-shaped Irish fishermen.

If an award were given for suffering in the service of decoration, though, it would probably go not to a knitter, but to Peter Sandback of New Hampshire, who drove 5,800 aluminum nails into a slab of oak to create the inlay design of his Nail Table #5. The piece is exquisite; one hopes that Mr. Sandback’s digits have not paid the price for its beauty.

For decoration in the service of suffering, the prize belongs to the Boston artist Leah Piepgras, for Consumption, dinnerware shown at “Model Citizens” that featured haunting images of the digestive tract. The dishes, which are manufactured in a limited edition by Pickard China, depict all the organs involved in processing food, from intake to output. Ms. Piepgras painted them freehand, using an anatomy book as a reference. She chose blues over more realistic reds and pinks to evoke X-rays, she said, and because “I didn’t want to gross people out.”

Though Consumption might dissuade diners from cleaning their plates, lest they have a clear view of things like salivary glands (which decorate the bottom of the teacup) and intestines (on the dinner plate), it was not Ms. Piepgras’s intention to kill anyone’s appetite. Rather, she wanted to emphasize the “mindfulness” of mealtime rituals, she said, in which partakers consume not only food but also conversation.

Indeed, the furniture fair demonstrated once again that designers are driven to make the world not just a nicerlooking, healthier place but also one that is more sociable.

James Ramsey, a Brooklyn architect who exhibited a modernist chicken coop with a solar-powered lighting and cooling system, said its floor-to-ceiling windows were inspired less by glass-loving architects like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson than by ant farms. The point was to let children observe the chickens in their daily routines.

Such as? “They eat, they sleep, they lay,” Mr. Ramsey noted. “It’s pretty straightforward. I don’t think they have many hobbies.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 26, 2011 An article last Thursday about the International Contemporary Furniture Fair misstated the name of a design studio that works with a Mexican artisans’ collective. It is Espacio Sami Hayek, not Espacio Hayek.

June 18, 2012

Earth Agonistes

By GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND

On Wednesday, world leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro to review progress made in the 20 years since the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit and hopefully to chart a new path toward a more sustainable future. Protecting the planet and its people must be their first priority.

Our central concern is that governments are currently refusing to make the transformative changes needed to resolve the global sustainability crisis.

The scientific evidence is clear that the environmental dangers are rising quickly. Based on current trends, we are likely to move toward a world warmer by 3 degrees, and we may well cross tipping points with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Human activities are likely propelling the planet out of the climatically and ecologically stable state, the Holocene, which has sustained human development over the past 10,000 years. Science reports that we are now instead entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where humans have become the most potent force.

With our current growth and development model we are indeed changing the earth system, and as a result rapidly undermining the resilience of the planet and the future of humanity. The pressures of ecosystem decline, pollution and resource depletion have become immense, drawing down on the economic prospects of present and future generations.

We are the first generation with scientific understanding of the new global risks facing humanity. We must respond decisively, equipped with the best available evidence as a basis for decisions.

This new predicament is recognized in the report by the United Nations secretary general’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, of which I am a member, which maintains that tinkering at the edges will not do the job. If its recommendations are fully and rapidly implemented, we would be well on our way toward a more sustainable world.

Results from the Nobel Laureate Symposium Series on Global Sustainability also show that nothing less than a fundamental transformation will be needed, where human societies are reconnected with the biosphere to reverse global environmental change and move toward fair and lasting prosperity.

Twenty years after the Earth Summit it is clear that humanity has been a poor steward for the Earth.

Institutions must be developed and strengthened at all levels in order to integrate the climate, biodiversity and development agendas and help address the legitimate interests of future generations. Global governance must focus on ensuring that economic and social development evolves within a safe range of the carrying capacity of the planet.

A new contract between science and society is urgently required. World leaders are urged to support new integrated Earth-system research, which can facilitate the transition to global sustainability. Trans-disciplinary cooperation and innovation are also needed. Priorities for immediate action are meeting the global needs for food, water and energy, while at the same time avoiding dangerous climate change, safeguarding biodiversity and managing the oceans sustainably.

Science tells us global greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than 2015 if we are to keep warming below 2 degrees and avoid dangerous climate change. For that to happen, governments must take action on many fronts.

While continued investments in innovation are needed, technology is not the obstacle. We also need to accelerate and scale up investments in poverty reduction, clean technology and ecosystem management, not to mention education.

Achieving equality for women must be a priority if we are to develop more sustainable livelihoods. Fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals, especially on women’s health, education, empowerment and economic status is a good and necessary first step.

There are compelling reasons to rethink the conventional model of economic growth. It is vitally important to decouple growth from resource use, while simultaneously generating new employment opportunities. We should move beyond G.D.P. as a measure of society’s progress, apply the “polluter pays” principle, ensure the full accounting of natural capital and ecosystem services in all economic decisions and greatly enhance resource efficiency by moving production systems toward a “circular economy” that is regenerative by design.

Our current development path is simply too risky for humanity. In the Anthropocene, all nations must learn to live within the safe operating space of Earth’s boundaries. This requires an agreement between the world’s governments for a fair and sustainable use of Earth’s natural capital.

The proposed Sustainable Development Goals, if aligned with the latest science, offer the prospect for a viable and equitable future for humanity.

Like no other generation before, we can choose the type of future that we will leave to the next generation. A transition to a safe and prosperous future is possible, but will require the full use of humanity’s extraordinary capacity for innovation and creativity.

Real leadership is required now to tackle these systemic issues. We therefore call upon world leaders to move beyond aspirational statements and exercise a collective responsibility for planetary stewardship, seizing the opportunity offered by the Rio 2012 summit to set our world on a sustainable path.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, is a member of the U.N. secretary general’s Highlevel Panel on Global Sustainability and a member of The Elders.

August 21, 2008

A Sustainability That Aims to Seduce

By STEPHEN ORR WHEN Kenneth Hillan and his partner, Duncan Robertson, requested that an 80-foot lap pool be built in the hilltop meadow outside their new Marin County, Calif., house several years ago, Bernard Trainor, a garden designer known for ecology-minded landscapes, could have balked. At first glance, the wild meadow and the unspoiled views seemed to cry out for a conservationist approach. And the clients had

been clear that they wanted the garden areas “to look completely natural, almost like California was before it had been farmed,” as Mr. Hillan put it.

The swimming pool was their first real request, Mr. Trainor said, and since they were into competitive swimming and he “knew it wouldn’t have to be a suburban-style pool for people to lounge around all day,” he embraced it as a challenge.

The resulting design, built in 2005, set a minimalist, carved-concrete, solar-heated pool almost seamlessly into the meadow, where it is surrounded by seasonal wildflowers and native grasses (planted mainly with seeds collected from the site before construction began) and reflects the surrounding hills like a groundlevel mirror.

Three years later, the plantings have begun to mature, restoring the property to something close to its original state and providing its weekender owners with low-maintenance natural beauty.

With its combination of scrupulous planting, formal as opposed to naturalistic design elements, and responsiveness to the clients’ desires — even when they strayed from strict conservationism — the Hillan-Robertson project is typical of an emerging movement in environmentally conscious landscape and garden design.

Over the past five years, as climate change has become more obvious and energy costs have spiraled up, a number of designers have begun to champion an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with a sensitivity to aesthetics and a flexibility that they said was missing from green-gardening crusades of the past.

Movements that gained popularity in the 1970s, like xeriscaping, which introduced the creed of no added water, and the native plant movement, often got in their own way, these designers believe, by getting hung up on orthodoxies.

“Xeriscaping as a rule tended to look horrible,” said Andrea Cochran, 54, a San Francisco landscape architect who did environmental planning for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Forest Service before moving on to residential gardens. “The save-the-planet message was powerful,” she added, but a lack of attention to aesthetic issues left her and other well-meaning gardeners unhappy with the results — dusty summer yards full of scrappy native species.

And too often, Mr. Trainor said, those earlier movements were overly rigid and prescriptive. “It’s hard to make ordinary people fit into such a tight scheme,” he said.

The main thing, these newer designers believe, is to win clients over to environmental landscaping through design that is both thoughtful and seductive.

In some cases, the seduction involves small adjustments to traditional eco-friendly practices. Mark Word, a 40-year-old designer who has been creating gardens in Austin, Tex., for 10 years, has faced resistance from some clients to native plants and other low-water alternatives. “Many native Texas plants, like certain grasses, tend to not look so good in 4-inch or 1-gallon pots at the nursery,” he explained. And “most people don’t want their garden to stick out as the only house on the block that looks radically different.”

Believing that he can push clients only so far without losing their confidence, he has found it helpful to temper native plantings with strong design elements that can act as visual anchors, such as crisp-edged stonework or a sculptural non-native plant like a sago palm or a silvery furcraea. In one recent project in Austin, a small front yard and a backyard at a second home for two doctors from Dallas, Mr. Word used a mix of native and foreign species, along with paths and retaining walls made of Texas Hill Country limestone, so his clients could relate to the garden more easily. “My projects need to weave nicely into the residential style of Austin,” he said. “They have to be conventionally attractive and recognizable as a garden in the sense of their particular neighborhood.”

Other designers delve deeper into their clients’ psyches, particularly when working on larger projects. “I used to hide behind the needs and desires of my clients in the interest of serving them,” Mr. Trainor said, “but now my starting point is the place. The clients bought their property for a reason; it’s up to me to uncover that reason and reveal it.” For gardens like the one in Marin County, his firm uses satellite imagery to identify large patterns in the geography and to zoom in on the edges of neighboring properties.

The images are used as design tools and as a means of helping clients appreciate the physical context of their property and understand how they are stewards of the land around them, even outside their own yards.

Thomas Woltz, a co-owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, which has offices in Charlottesville, Va., and Manhattan, likewise emphasizes “the dynamic power of a garden’s site,” both in his designs and in his communication with clients. “Sometimes it seems like people think that anything that was originally on their property must be vulgar or undesirable and needs to be replaced with something new,” said Mr. Woltz, 40. “I find that as you focus your lens on the beauty of the local, it becomes so much more potent.”

At Tupelo Farm, an estate near Charlottesville, Mr. Woltz drew on the region’s geology, agricultural traditions and plants — both native and imported — in designing the garden, a project that he has been

working on since 2000. Locally quarried fieldstone walls retain the heat of the springtime sun and establish curving terraces for a peach orchard, a gesture at Albemarle County’s history as one of the state’s largest producer of peaches in the 19th century. Nearby, on a smooth flagstone terrace, a group of half-buried boulders has the same geological composition and similarly mounded shapes as the Blue Ridge Mountains that loom over the farmland.

Not that the project is only about symbolism. Mr. Woltz — who grew up on a farm in North Carolina and who became a convert to ecological design under the influence of his wife, Hara, a conservation biologist — typically pays a lot of attention to scientific and agricultural matters like soil analysis and rainwater collection. At Tupelo Farm, his firm worked with experts to establish native sedges on the property’s lowest points, where rainwater gathers. These grasslike plants tolerate standing water and help cleanse excess runoff from nearby livestock paddocks.

For Ms. Cochran, known for her sleek, pared-down gardens, elements of the hardscape — walls, water features, paths — are also a primary concern. Her design for Walden Studios, a mixed-use development where artists live and work in Sonoma County, Calif., that won an American Society of Landscape Architecture award in 2008, has graphic overlapping planes of crushed local Napa cobble chip in the style of a classic French garden. Rows of trees — a formal allée of fruitless mulberries and a sunken bosque of Korean pears — continue the lines of the adjacent vineyards.

For environmental and practical reasons, she tries to use local stone that blends in with the site’s color palette, but she sometimes finds that what is closest at hand is not always what appeals most to her clients. “The fact that people often want the more exotic imported items, a stone brought in from China can be cheaper to buy even with the shipping costs,” she said. “It can be a challenge to keep your principles in the face of budget concerns.”

But after two years of drought, the worst in California’s history, Ms. Cochran can sense that attitudes are changing. “These days, everybody’s talking about green issues and sustainability,” said Ms. Cochran, who has run her own firm for 10 years. “I find my clients really want to engage in a more meaningful way. They want to think holistically about their property.”

Steven Oliver, her client on the Walden Studios project and the owner of a construction company, Oliver & Company, in the San Francisco Bay Area, agrees. “Ten years or so ago, unless people were approaching a building project with a totally moral or ethical commitment, they wouldn’t have given the idea of green design a second thought,” he said. “Now we are in a completely different environment where everyone is thinking of these issues to some degree.” He also noted that until recently, seeking certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design was an expensive choice for a building

project, adding 20 to 30 percent to the cost of construction. Now, he said, the features required for LEED compliance are more affordable.

Mr. Trainor also finds that his clients “are more receptive to change now.”

“They know things have to move forward,” he said. “They don’t always know how to do it, but they want to do things differently.”

Still, he and other designers said, the message of conservation and environmental responsibility cannot be couched in punitive terms if it is to succeed. “People shouldn’t have to make a choice between beauty and sustainability,” Ms. Cochran said. “Our work is designed so that I am able to say to our clients during a presentation, ‘Oh, and by the way, its also sustainable.’ ”

We’re Stuck at the Same Level of Ignorance

Carroll Doherty is the associate director, editorial, for the Pew Research Center.

UPDATED OCTOBER 22, 2012, 5:28 PM

In 2007, the Pew Research Center set out to test whether the wide array of news sources available at that time made people any better informed. The answer: Not so much. Roughly as many people could name the vice president, or their state’s governor, as were able to do so in 1989. On some questions, people did better; on others, they did worse.

But the bottom line was that people were about as likely to name key leaders, and were about as aware of major news events, as they had been nearly two decades earlier.

The rise of digital news sources is having little impact on the millions of Americans who are not that interested in the news, Information technology today – constant news on Twitter and Facebook, streaming video on iPhones – makes 2007 seem like the Dark Ages. But Pew Research’s “news IQ” quizzes have found that the public continues to struggle with many basic facts about politics and current events. In our most recent quiz, in July, just 34 percent of Americans were able to identify John Roberts as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, from a list that included Harry Reid and the late William Rehnquist.

As was the case in the predigital era, college graduates are better informed than those with less education. Yet the swelling ranks of college graduates have not led to a better informed public. Moreover, while education is correlated with increased knowledge about prominent people and news events, it may not confer as much of an advantage as it did in the 1980s.

For people who actively seek out information on politics and current events, the current media landscape provides previously unimagined opportunities for obtaining news and information. Want to watch the presidential debate on your cellphone? Easy. Tweet about it as it is happening? No problem. But the rise of digital news sources is having less of an impact on the millions of Americans who are not that interested in the news, who lack the background to make sense of it, or who simply can’t afford the technology.

Join Room for Debate on Facebook and follow updates ontwitter.com/roomfordebate.

August 9, 2012

An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China

By JANE PERLEZ Hangzhou, China WANG SHU, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker prize, arrives at his studio here most mornings and sits at a desk with sheets of soft brown paper, a cup for mixing black ink with water, and a brush. He reads seventh-century poetry and then begins to write calligraphy, quick short strokes up and down the page. The ritual, he says, infuses calm into the day ahead.

The ancient art is not the only thing that sets Mr. Wang and his work apart from the glitzy marble-and-glass commercial architecture that has dominated China’s urban boom. His bold yet refined buildings that often recall nature fuse old-world Chinese and modern idioms, using inexpensive materials, like recycled bricks and tiles, as building material. His studio, called the Amateur Architecture Studio, does not have a Mac. A few dusty terminals, from the 1990s, surrounded by piles of old newspapers, are scattered across the tabletops. His six assistants,

students at the nearby academy of art in this still, pretty lakeside city, show up as needed. This particular afternoon Mr. Wang, and his wife and fellow architect, Lu Wenyu, unlocked the front door — a big slab of wood — to find no one around.

In awarding this year’s Pritzker Prize to Mr. Wang, 48, in February, the jury catapulted to center stage an architect who profoundly disagrees with China’s rush to urbanization and has found a way to criticize it through his own style of work. Mr. Wang, who grew up in China’s far western reaches in Xinjiang province, is an outlier in his profession here. He has designed only one apartment building, a series of 14-story blocks with deep verandas, in Hangzhou. His museums, academies, homes, and a garden of ancient tiles are all touched by old China. Yet China’s vice prime minister, Li Keqiang, a master of the economy that has produced the cities Mr. Wang abhors, embraced him at the Pritzker award ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in May. Images of the pair — the man who will most likely become prime minister in the coming leadership changes, and the architect, dressed in black — were splashed across China’s news media.

It is the rush to emulate the West and the insistence on trashing what makes China so distinctive that upsets Mr. Wang. Why should China become something it’s not, he asks. “We want to copy Manhattan,” he said over lunch near his studio. “I love Manhattan. It’s a very interesting place.

But if you want to copy something that was accomplished in 200 years, it’s very difficult. New York was not designed by architects, it was designed by time.”

Part of his criticism is driven by a recognition that a nexus of government officials and crony investors have made enormous amounts of money clearing land of old dwellings and broken roads to build highways, airports, rail stations and housing. “Sixty percent of government income comes not from normal tax but from the sale of land,” he said. Some reports put the percentage of take from land sales even higher. Phoenix New Media, a company in Hong Kong that is sympathetic to the Chinese government, recently quoted a report from the Ministry of Land and Resources that said that 74.1 percent of government revenues in 2010 came from land sales, up from virtually zero in 1989.

Mr. Wang is sympathetic to poor farmers who yearn for cities with air-conditioning and supermarkets. But if given the chance to renew villages in a sustainable way, rural people would be better off, he argues. One of his latest projects involves persuading a Communist Party secretary in a village near Hangzhou not to tear down the dwellings but to renovate using the original tiles and bricks. “People see black-and-white choices,” he said. “But in fact we have much potential, and can do very simple things and have a modern, comfortable life.”

Two architects who know Mr. Wang’s work emphasize his ability to combine the old and the new, Chinese and Western. “It’s possible to see Wang Shu’s work as a new vernacular,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “He’s actually deeply rooted in modernism. His work is not something that is just a replica of Chinese architecture or just a replica of Western architecture. It’s a fusion of different sensibilities.”

Zhang Yonghe, a prominent Chinese architect who headed the school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Mr. Wang as enabling “us to see the vitality of the traditional in contemporary culture, that modernization is not the same as Westernization.” He praised Mr. Wang for having unusual integrity: “In today’s China it’s not easy to resist market pressures and maintain independent values as Wang Shu has done.”

His work includes an eclectic mix of museums, universities and living spaces. In its citation the Pritzker jury singled out the History Museum of Ningbo, in a port city near Shanghai, for “its strength, pragmatism and emotions all in one.” The museum looks bulky from a distance; up close the recycled ceramic tiles and vintage bricks in hues of gray, orange and blue lend a feeling of earthiness. The China Academy of Art at Xiangshan in Hangzhou, a half-dozen buildings, is dominated by white walls reminiscent of traditional Chinese homes depicted in old watercolor paintings. A work from 2000, the library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University in Suzhou, consists of a white cube jutting into a lake with front walls of glass.

Even with the prominence that his Pritzker prize has conferred, Mr. Wang is not venturing abroad. His post-Pritzker projects include a rammed-earth building that will serve as a hotel for professors visiting the campus of the art academy.

Wherever possible he uses recyclable materials, an art he refined in the 1990s when he put aside formal architecture to work with craftsmen and builders as they converted old houses into art galleries, music halls, even hair salons. By 2000 he was appointed professor of architecture at the art academy in Hangzhou and was back in big-league architecture, entering competitions and accepting commissions.

His vision matured at a time when provincial governments and college campuses, flush with new cash, commissioned museums and additional buildings, like libraries, that intrigued Mr. Wang.

In emphasizing the value of what is distinctively Chinese, he is not one of the new breed of nationalists. He and Ms. Lu enjoy taking their 11-year-old son on overseas trips, and for the last few years they jointly taught a course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on traditional Chinese villages as a basis for creating what they called “rustic-style” new suburbs.

They are an inseparable couple, with an around-the-clock working partnership that seems easy, sometimes jokey and truly collaborative, so much so that the Pritzker jury contemplated giving the award jointly. They met in architecture class at the Nanjing Institute of Technology, when he eyed the “girl in the green sweater,” he said, who also, it turned out, came from Xinjiang. “In terms of our work, I’m more responsible for the design while Lu Wenyu is more responsible for the implementation,” he said. Mr. Wang is the serious personality, almost professorial in demeanor. Ms. Lu is more outgoing. When they met, she said, she laid down a condition: She would be his girlfriend but would not attend the after-class seminars he conducted for eager students in the university dormitory.

The new campus of the China Academy of Art at Xiangshan was one of the works that most impressed the Pritzker jurors when they visited China last fall. Mr. Wang often drives to the campus with Ms. Lu. More accurately, she drives. He does not have a license and sits in the passenger seat of their modest station wagon. No Porsche, the preferred vehicle of some Chinese architects, for Mr. Wang.

As the jury toured the site, Thomas J. Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel fortune that finances the Pritzker prize, asked Mr. Wang the cost of building the campus, he recalled. “I said the first phase was 1,500 yuan per square meter, and the second phase was 2,500 yuan per square meter,” Mr. Wang said he replied. Even before hearing the translation into dollars of about $235 and $392 per square meter, Mr. Pritzker intuitively understood. “It cost nothing,” Mr. Pritzker told his colleagues. In contrast, a prestige office building in Beijing costs $952 a square meter, according to Langdon & Seah, a project management consultancy, in Hong Kong.

The campus was a dream assignment, Mr. Wang said. The bid called for an international caliber building for 5,000 students on a low budget to be built on abandoned rice fields. The art academy’s president, Xu Jiang, an artist, was Mr. Wang’s friend, and, in this case, his client. The first decision: to keep as much of the natural environment as possible. The buildings were erected on the edge of the fields, leaving open space all around. Second: no marble clad on concrete pillars in the wasteful style of the art academy in downtown Hangzhou. The campus is distinctive, Mr. Mostafavi said, because unlike most university campuses it is not subsumed by a master plan. “Here are buildings that come together as a series of fragments that produce a sense of unity,” he said.

As he showed the academy, Mr. Wang acknowledged that the finishes were not perfect. Along the internal walkways, jagged holes were punched through the exterior walls, to bring the outside in. Reddish wood from local yew trees was used for walls and doors. “It’s very cheap and grows

very fast,” he said. In 20 years the wood will need to be replaced. Bamboo railings will have to be renewed in five to seven years. “It’s sustainable,” he said, “all very easy to replace.”

That such an unconventional architect should win the Pritzker in a country that has embraced foreign architects — including the past Pritzker winners Norman Foster andZaha Hadid — for the design of buildings in China’s big cities astounded the powerful construction interests. Mr. Wang calls them the “normal group,” professionals who greeted his award with public silence.

In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony, Mr. Wang confronted the establishment with questions, a rare and brave act. Would it be possible, he asked, to ensure that alongside “the topdown professional system of modern architecture, ordinary people’s right to initiate their own building activities is also protected?” Did China really need to “resort to gigantic symbolic and iconic structures?” Were there “smarter ways to address environmental and ecological challenges?” Such difference of opinion before top government officials was striking, said Hong Huang, a columnist for the liberal newsmagazine Nandu Weekly. “It’s voices like that that will start to change China,” she said.

Behind the scenes, among the young Chinese architects who are developing an alternative architectural style inspired by Mr. Wang’s work, he detects chatter. “Young architects are very happy,” he said. “They can see some hope.”

Bree Feng contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: August 26, 2012 An article on Aug. 12 about Wang Shu, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, misstated the time frame when China’s vice prime minister, Li Keqiang, is likely to become his country’s next prime minister. Mr. Li, who embraced Mr. Wang at the Pritzker award ceremony in May, is expected to assume the post in China’s coming leadership changes, which will probably happen next spring, not this fall.

October 14, 2012

In Bedroom Community, Birth of a Tech Center

By SARAH MASLIN NIR A canopy of solar cells, a nearly classroom-free academic center, cafes open to the public and even a hotel. The new campus of the Cornell University graduate school for technology is expected to transform Roosevelt Island from a sleepy bedroom community into a hightechnology hothouse, and indeed, the plans to be formally unveiled for the campus on Monday bear little resemblance to anything that is there now.

The campus, at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, is to be built in two phases. The first phase, the bulk of which consists of a low-slung academic hub and a taller residential building just south of the Queensboro Bridge, has a projected opening in 2017. Phase Two will comprise several more buildings, aligned along a central walk down the island’s spine. The campus will include several “co-location” buildings, a hallmark of the graduate school, where industry professionals from companies like Facebook and Google can work in concert with graduate students.

And it will not be complete until 2037, according to Cornell officials, a timeline that foretells more than two decades of heavy construction on a spit of land that is 800 feet across at its widest point.

The release of the plans will begin a process of public comment and review expected to last around seven months, beginning with the local community board, and culminating with a vote by the City Council, according to Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the project. If successful, the university hopes to break ground in 2014 on the first phase, which is designed to accommodate more than 1,400 students and faculty and staff members; it would include an executive education center and a privately operated hotel, which would be open to the public. Although Cornell officials said the plans could change, they envision a final campus that holds more than 5,000 people.

Some of the renderings to be released Monday show a glassy, five-story academic center designed by the architect Thom Mayne. It will have only six classrooms and be filled instead with open spaces and small “huddle rooms” for breakaway discussion, said Ung-joo Scott Lee of Mr. Mayne’s firm, Morphosis Architects.

The building, according to the architects and university officials, will be a “net zero” building, producing as much energy as it consumes. A canopy of photovoltaic cells forsolar power undulates over the top, and plans are being considered to have wells harvesting geothermal energy and to work with companies currently experimenting with submerging turbines in the East River to gather energy from the current.

Cornell NYC Tech, as the new campus is to be called, is “the first graduate research institution where someone is trying to design it from the ground up in the information age,” Daniel P. Huttenlocher, its dean, said.

“That is a very abstract goal, and frankly we don’t understand the consequences of trying to design something for a new age right now,” he said.

Several universities, including M.I.T. and Stanford, have industrial parks near their campuses.

Mr. Huttenlocher said the co-location buildings, which are to be leased by private technology companies in the hope that they will work with students, advance that trend by integrating industry into the campus itself.

Though the technology-focused graduate center is an academic partnership between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Cornell is responsible for construction, and it plans to have private developers for the buildings. The city has provided 10 acres of land and pledged up to $100 million for improvements to the island’s infrastructure. Last year, Charles F. Feeney, a Cornell alumnus, donated $350 million to the project through the group Atlantic Philanthropies.

In January, Cornell NYC Tech’s first students will begin taking classes in the building in Chelsea that houses Google’s New York headquarters.

Work on Roosevelt Island will begin with moving patients from the southern complex of the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility and then demolishing its buildings.

The island is traversed by one central road, Main Street, and accessible by car by the Roosevelt Island Bridge, which connects it to Queens. University officials said they planned to bring

construction and demolition materials by road, rather than barge, which they said would greatly increase the cost.

That could turn out to be the most controversial aspect of the project. Noise from garbage trucks is already a problem, as is gridlock, said Frank Farance, 54, the chairman of the planning committee of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association.

“I think the community will have strong opposition to having the roads tied up that way,” Mr. Farance said. Also, he said, the bridge ramps and roads seem unlikely to hold up under the increased traffic. It would be foolhardy, he said, to depend on “this very weak infrastructure that might fall apart.”

Still, Oscar Hernandez, the manager of Nonno’s Focacceria and Pizzeria on Main Street, was hopeful. “We expect to have a lot more business with Cornell,” he said. Mr. Hernandez said he was not concerned that the campus would have cafes open to the public. “We make good food here,” he said.

September 12, 2012

The Cult of Disappearing Design

By JESSE McKINLEY THE first thing you see when you walk into Patrick McInerney’s living room is that there’s nothing to see. The walls are bare, and ditto for the ceiling. You try to switch on the lights, but there doesn’t appear to be a switch. There’s music playing, but where is it coming from? The lamp is obviously working — the bulb is lighted, after all — but it seems to be plugged into ... the plaster?

Part interior illusionist and part aesthetic anorexic, Mr. McInerney is a practicing member of the cult of disappearing design, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t ethos that aims to secrete away anything that needs a button, a cord or a subwoofer to work. It’s a passion that Mr. McInerney, a 44-year-old architect from San Diego, takes seriously, comparing his drive to streamline with the process of writing a novel.

“Each word is considered and refined, not only for the word’s meaning but also its relationship to other words,” he wrote in an e-mail. “And the landscape in which the words are brought together.”

Indeed, more than simply stashing your stereo in a closet or throwing a shawl over your ottoman, the all-invisible aesthetic aims for a higher-minded goal: creating unified spaces that flow from room to room and place to place.

“We’re interested in having our work reflect and melt into the environment,” said Rene Gonzalez, a Miami architect who reflected and melted his vision into a client’s $47 million home in Dade County, Fla. “We think about enclosures that can dissipate and disappear, so that the outside and inside bleed into each other.”

Driven by technology and old-fashioned ingenuity, such design pursues goals like “zero sightlines” (fixtures that can’t be seen in profile) as well as creating seamless — and shadowless — surfaces. Tricks are plentiful and often James Bond-ian: light switches are camouflaged to appear to be part of the wall, for example, while lighting fixtures lurk behind small apertures.

Handle-less drawers open with a touch of a finger, while dining room tables collapse to less than an inch wide. (Note: remove plates before folding.)

One major proponent of the unseen look is the Trufig brand, which offers all manner of disguised designs, like power outlets and data jacks that blend into the background, and tablets and touch panels installed into walls. Trufig advertises itself as “a revolutionary design solution” that abides by a strict rule: “Be completely flush-mounted.” All of which, the brand promises, will alleviate deeply annoying eyesores, including devices that “protrude out of the wall or ceiling creating distracting shadow lines.”

“Unfortunately, code, safety and convenience dictate they be there,” reads a section of the company’s brochure, which features a photograph of a chameleon in front of a marble wall. “Do they have to be such a visual intrusion?”

On a more practical, less superficial level, disappearing design is meant to both maximize one’s ground plan (particularly in small urban apartments) and minimize the “visual noise” created by things like bulky knobs, dust-prone vents and the ancient albatross of many decorators: the widescreen TV. “People like, more and more, a clean look,” said Alexandra Mathews, the vice president for international sales and marketing at Lucifer Lighting, which is based in San Antonio. “It’s nice to be in a place where you’re not forced to look at a bunch of things.”

And while Ms. Mathews and other acolytes concede that such a look isn’t for everyone — “Some people like hardware and clutter,” she said — they note that there is plenty of proof that such a modernist-tinged look is in vogue, offering as evidence the popularity of both Ikea furniture and iPads. (The former being mass-market minimal, the latter being basically buttonless.)

B. Alex Miller, a partner in Taylor & Miller Architecture in Brooklyn, concurred, adding that the debate between showing things and stowing things is a long-running one. “You go to any architecture office on the face of the planet,” he said, “and it’s a battle that goes on every day.”

Joesph Tanney, at Resolution: 4 Architecture, said that reflected light is also a useful tool, something he employed with a 30-foot wall of cabinetry with hidden hardware that he recently designed for a Fifth Avenue apartment. Made of medium-density fiberboard, wrapped in glossy thermofoil, it created a smooth, airy effect. “The place feels like you’re in a cloud!” Mr. Tanney wrote in an e-mail.

Much of the current deceptive design originated decades ago with tinkerers who took apart factory-built goods (stereo speakers and tuners, ceiling fans and cooktops) to find ways of making them more appealing. And while professional work of this variety used to be the exclusive domain of custom designers — very expensive custom designers — today’s disappearing acts are more likely to be mass-produced and considerably cheaper to pull off.

“It’s something that architects and designers have been wanting to do for years, but it’s always been ultraluxury, one-off custom stuff,” said Rob Roland, the executive vice president of Dana Innovations in San Clemente, Calif., the parent company of Trufig. “What’s starting to happen now is that it’s moving down the pyramid.” And all over the house, apparently. C. C. Sullivan, a spokesman for Lucifer (the company of lighting, not the Prince of Darkness), outlined all kinds of spots where traditional elements are disappearing or becoming less obtrusive, including

cooktops, kitchen appliances, bath accessories, drawer fronts, baseboards, medicine cabinets and window frames.

Many of the fixes, while technological in nature, are meant to hide other unsightly technological gadgets. For example, a decade ago, flat-screen TVs seemed to be the answer to the giant consoles of the “Ozzie and Harriet” era. But the growing size of the screens has proved to be a new challenge.

In response, the Séura company in Green Bay, Wis., sells a line of “vanishing” TVs that look like large mirrors when they are not being used. The company offers more than 100 frames for the sets, from “sleek accent” styles to a “collection of candy-colored frames” that would seemingly defeat the purpose of de-emphasizing the TV. But even before you hit the media room, design is disappearing, with companies like Modern Doors Direct in Miami offering frame-free entryways that promise clean lines, a European look and, it almost seems, a better sex life.

“Clean lines and rumpled sheets,” a video on the site announces, depicting two very goodlooking people in love. “Sleek, seamless doors lead to a life beyond this room.” (O.K., just make sure you close the seamless door before you rumple those sheets.)

And speaking of sleeping arrangements, one of the earliest proponents of disappearing design was William L. Murphy, who invented his pivoting bed in the early 1900s. Since then, many have attempted improvements on the Murphy bed, with varying degrees of success.

Take the Bed Up Down system, which allows a mattress to seemingly materialize from the heavens, dropping into any space available (it’s actually lowered from a compartment in the ceiling). The company’s Italian language Web site is positively bubbly about the levitating berth.

“Up down bed is the bed that space does not care,” the site reads. “But it creates!”

The French designer René Bouchara also has a take on the Murphy bed, with a sleek white-onwhite retractable that would not look out of place in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Likewise, Mr. Bouchara designed a nifty, and nearly invisible, console table, sold at Roche Bobois, that is made almost entirely of clear glass, which must be great fun with clumsy children or easily confused pets.

Transparency and simplicity can be effective tactics, but Mr. Miller, the Brooklyn architect, noted that sometimes complexity worked just as well. For a hair salon his firm recently designed, he employed a “relentless ubiquity,” he said. “We had to fight fire with fire.”

The approach involved covering every surface in the salon with wood shelving (even the ceiling), creating what he called a “complex kind of waffle space.” The result, he said, was a monochromatic environment that made the salon seem warmer.

That said, while waffles are fine, thin planar surfaces appear to be more common in disappearing design. Fisher & Paykel makes sleek flat-topped stoves with controls that sit on the same plane as the ceramic glass cooktop. No messy back panel, no greasy front knobs, and the entire stove is less than four inches tall.

But that’s almost bulky compared with the table and chairs designed by Alexander Gendell’s Folditure, whose futuristic, collapsible pieces continue a tradition of folding furniture that it says dates to ancient Egypt. (The Pyramids were famously tough to decorate.) Both the table and chair, known as the Cricket and the Leaf, fold to less than an inch thick, which means you could hang the seating for your dinner party in the same closet where you stow your guests’ coats.

Folding is also the idea behind a shower concept from Duravit, a German company that claims to specialize in “living bathrooms for living people.” Its OpenSpace shower enclosure comes with two locking doors that collapse against the wall after you’re done scrubbing. The doors can be clad in a reflective surface as well, providing a full-length mirror.

Can’t see yourself through all that steam? Well, that’s when you need the wall-mounted exhaust fan by the Ukrainian designer Michael Samoriz, which pops out from the wall, then retracts when its work is done. The fan’s exterior is meant to blend in with tile surfaces, and the only indication that the device is not another tile is a thin strip of LEDs around its perimeter.

AND while we’re on the subject of folding and collapse, why not add some decay to the mix?

Giovanni Tomasini, an Italian designer with a soft spot for small things, designed a garden gnome that dissolves in front of your eyes. Created with composted materials, Mr. Tomasini’s sculptures slowly fall apart as they sit on your lawn, leaving behind a deposit of plant food and hard-to-forget images of melting elves.

Architects like Mr. McInerney, of course, hope that visitors will take away more-pleasing images from their work. And at his home in San Diego, that effort is everywhere (and nowhere) all at

once: the oh-so-subtle stereo speakers on the ceiling, for example, are perfectly integrated into the texture and color of the plaster. Likewise, light streams out of slots and punctures rather than visible fixtures. And the lamps that are in view plug into outlets that are also integrated into the plaster finish.

All of which seems to be both a confirmation of one of Mr. McInerney’s long-held beliefs about design (“Architecture consists of many single parts which must be joined together”) and something he thought was long overdue.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “It’s sort of like, ‘Why has it taken so long to get here?’ ”

October 7, 2012

The Patent, Used as a Sword

By CHARLES DUHIGG and STEVE LOHR

When Apple announced last year that all iPhones would come with a voice-activated assistant named Siri, capable of answering spoken questions, Michael Phillips’s heart sank.

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.

But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.

Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.

Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.

When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.

But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.

Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.

Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.

As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.

“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”

Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.

Apple has filed multiple suits against three companies — HTC, Samsung and Motorola Mobility, now part of Google — that today are responsible for more than half of all smartphone sales in the United States. If Apple’s claims — which include ownership of minor elements like rounded square icons and of more fundamental smartphone technologies — prevail, it will most likely force competitors to overhaul how they design phones, industry experts say.

HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others have filed numerous suits of their own, also trying to claim ownership of market-changing technologies.

While Apple and other major companies have sometimes benefited from this war, so have smaller partners. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri Inc., the company behind the software of the same name. The stock price of Mr. Ricci’s company, Nuance, which had by then become Siri’s partner, rose by more than 70 percent as iPhone sales skyrocketed. Some former executives at Vlingo, Nuance’s old rival, remain bitter.

“We had spent $3 million to win one patent trial, and had five more to go,” said a former Vlingo executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had signed confidentiality agreements. “We had the better product, but it didn’t matter, because this system is so completely broken.”

Mr. Ricci declined to be interviewed. Others at Nuance said they were simply protecting their intellectual property.

“Our responsibility is to follow the law,” said Lee Patch, a vice president at Nuance. “That’s what we do. It’s not our fault if some people don’t like the system.”

Today, Nuance is a giant in voice recognition. Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

And the iPhone is wrapped in thousands of patents that keep companies in numerous court battles.

“Apple has always stood for innovation,” the company wrote in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times. “To protect our inventions, we have patented many of the new technologies in these groundbreaking and category-defining products. In the rare cases when we take legal action over a patent dispute, it’s only as a last resort.

“We think companies should dream up their own products rather than willfully copying ours, and in August a jury in California reached the same conclusion,” the statement said.

At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.”

“There’s some of this that is maddening,” he said. “It’s a waste; it’s a time suck.”

The evolution of Apple into one of the industry’s patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.

A Patent Warrior’s Education It was 2006, and Apple was preparing to unveil the first iPhone. Life inside company headquarters, former executives said, had become a frenzy of programming sessions and meetings between engineers and executives. And, increasingly, patent lawyers.

Just months earlier, Apple reluctantly agreed to pay $100 million to Creative Technology, a Singapore-based company. Five years before, Creative applied for a broad software patent for a “portable music playback device” that bore minor similarities to the iPod, an Apple product that had gone on sale the same year. Once the patent was granted to Creative, it became a license to sue.

Apple settled three months after Creative went to court. “Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent,” Mr. Jobs said in a statement announcing the settlement in 2006.

Privately, Mr. Jobs gathered his senior managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, “we’re going to patent it all,” he declared, according to a former executive who, like other former employees, requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

“His attitude was that if someone at Apple can dream it up, then we should apply for a patent, because even if we never build it, it’s a defensive tool,” said Nancy R. Heinen, Apple’s general counsel until 2006.

Soon, Apple’s engineers were asked to participate in monthly “invention disclosure sessions.”

One day, a group of software engineers met with three patent lawyers, according to a former Apple patent lawyer who was at the meeting.

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web. “That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

“Even if we knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.”

The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.

It is a complaint heard throughout the industry. The increasing push to assert ownership of broad technologies has led to a destructive arms race, engineers say. Some point to so-called patent trolls, companies that exist solely to sue over patent violations. Others say big technology companies have also exploited the system’s weaknesses.

“There are hundreds of ways to write the same computer program,” said James Bessen, a legal expert at Harvard. And so patent applications often try to encompass every potential aspect of a new technology. When such applications are approved, Mr. Bessen said, “the borders are fuzzy, so it’s really easy to accuse others of trespassing on your ideas.”

The number of patent applications, computer-related and otherwise, filed each year at the United States patent office has increased by more than 50 percent over the last decade to more than 540,000 in 2011. Google has received 2,700 patents since 2000, according to the patent analysis firm M-CAM. Microsoft has received 21,000.

In the last decade, the number of patent applications submitted by Apple each year has risen almost tenfold. The company has won ownership of pinching a screen to zoom in, of using magnets to affix a cover to a tablet computer and of the glass staircases in Apple stores. It has received more than 4,100 patents since 2000, according to M-CAM. And as patent portfolios have expanded, so have pressures to use them against competitors.

In March 2010, Apple sued HTC, a Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer that had partnered with Google. Apple did not talk to HTC before suing. Negotiations were not part of the strategy, according to a former executive. “Google was the enemy, the real target,” the executive said.

It was one of seven major smartphone and patent-related lawsuits Apple has initiated since 2006.

The suits have focused on two large companies, HTC and Samsung, both Google partners, which together account for 39 percent of American smartphone sales. Apple has also filed countersuits against Nokia, as well as against Motorola Mobility, which is now owned by Google and accounts for 12 percent of sales.

In addition, the company has filed two declaratory judgment actions asking the courts to rule on the provenance and validity of patents. Over the same period, Apple itself has been sued 135 times, mostly by patent trolls interested in its deep pockets.

Apple is not alone. The number of patent lawsuits filed in United States district courts each year has almost tripled in the last two decades to 3,260 in 2010, the last year for which federal data is available. Microsoft has sued Motorola; Motorola has sued Apple and Research in Motion; Research in Motion has sued Visto, a mobile technology company; and in August, Google, through its Motorola unit, sued Apple, contending that Siri had infringed on its patents. (Google dropped the suit last week, leaving open the possibility of refiling at a later date.) All of those companies have also been sued numerous times by trolls.

Patents for software and some kinds of electronics, particularly smartphones, are now so problematic that they contribute to a so-called patent tax that adds as much as 20 percent to companies’ research and development costs, according to a study conducted last year by two Boston University professors.

Supporters of suits initiated by Apple say that the litigation is vital to the company’s success and that Apple is sued far more often than it sues, as do all major tech firms.

“If we can’t protect our intellectual property, then we won’t spend millions creating products like the iPhone,” a former Apple executive said, noting that some of Apple’s patents, like the “slide to unlock” feature on the iPhone, took years to perfect. The concept “might seem obvious now, but that’s only after we spent millions figuring it out,” the executive said. “Other companies shouldn’t be able to steal that without compensating us. That’s why the patent system exists.”

But others challenge that logic, given the huge profits the technology industry enjoys. Apple collects more than $1 billion a week in iPhone and related sales. “I am skeptical whether patents are needed in the software industry to provide adequate incentives,” Judge Posner wrote in an email.

One consequence of all this litigation, policy makers and academics say, is that patent disputes are suffocating the culture of start-ups that has long fueled job growth and technological innovation.

“Think of the billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet,” said Ms. Heinen, the former Apple general counsel, who left the company and paid $2.2 million in connection with a federal investigation of stock option backdating. “When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign

for where an industry is heading,” she said, adding that she had no issue with the lawyers themselves.

There are some indications that the big companies themselves are growing weary of this warfare.

In its response to The Times, Apple addressed “standards-essential” patents, which companies are obligated to license to competitors at reasonable rates, and wrote that it was “deeply concerned by the rampant abuse of standards-essential patents by some of our competitors.”

“Standards-essential patents are technologies which these companies have volunteered to license to anyone for a reasonable fee,” the statement said, “but instead of negotiating with Apple, they’ve chosen to sue us.” Samsung, Motorola, Nokia and HTC have sued Apple, claiming it violated standards-essential patents.

Another sign of fatigue is the frequency with which executives and lawyers from Apple and Google speak to one another about patent disputes. Earlier this year, Google proposed a ceasefire, according to people familiar with the conversations. And when Google withdrew its Motorola suit last week, it was widely seen as a peace gesture.

But Apple has been hard to pin down, said one person from Google who was not authorized to speak publicly. “Sometimes they’re asking for money. Then they say we have to promise to not copy aspects of the iPhone. And whenever we get close to an agreement, it all changes again.

“Our feeling is they don’t really want this to end. As long as everyone is distracted by these trials, the iPhone continues to sell.”

Apple declined to comment on the negotiations.

The Patent Bureaucracy The application by Apple that eventually became patent 8,086,604 first crossed desks at the Patent and Trademark Office on a winter day in 2004.

In the next two years, a small cast of officials spent about 23 hours — the time generally allotted for reviewing a new application — examining the three dozen pages before recommending rejection. The application, for a voice- and text-based search engine, was “an obvious variation” on existing ideas, a patent examiner named Raheem Hoffler wrote. Over the next five years, Apple modified and resubmitted the application eight times — and each time it was rejected by the patent office.

Until last year.

On its 10th attempt, Apple got patent 8,086,604 approved. Today, though the patent was not among those Vlingo and Nuance fought over, it is known as the Siri patent because it is widely viewed as one of the linchpins of Apple’s strategy to protect its smartphone technologies.

In February, the company deployed this new patent in a continuing lawsuit against Samsung that could radically reorder the $200 billion smartphone business by giving Apple effective ownership of now-commonplace technologies, software experts say.

Patent 8,086,604’s path to approval “shows there’s a lot wrong with the process,” said Arti K. Rai, an intellectual property expert at Duke University School of Law who reviewed the patent application for The Times. That patent, like numerous others, is an example of how companies can file an application again and again until they win approval, Ms. Rai said.

When Apple submitted the first application for 8,086,604, the iPhone and Siri did not exist. The application was aspirational: it described a theoretical “universal interface” that would allow people to search across various mediums, like the Internet, corporate databases and computer hard drives, without having to use multiple search engines. It outlined how such software might function, but it did not offer specifics about how to build it. It suggested that some people might speak a search phrase rather than use a keyboard.

The ideas contained in the application would blossom at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance, Vlingo and dozens of other companies. All the while, the application traveled quietly through the patent office, where officials rejected it twice in 2007, three times in 2008, once in 2009, twice in 2010 and once in 2011.

The patent office has a reputation for being overworked, understaffed and plagued by employee turnover, and employees concede that some of their work is subjective.

“When I get an application, I basically have two days to research and write a 10- to 20-page term paper on why I think it should be approved or rejected,” said Robert Budens, a 22-year patent examiner and president of the examiners’ labor union. “I’m not going to pretend like we get it right every time.”

To receive a patent, an invention must be novel (substantially different from what exists), not obvious (one can’t patent a new toaster simply by expanding it to handle five slices of bread), and useful (someone can’t patent an invisibility machine if invisibility is impossible).

“If you give the same application to 10 different examiners, you’ll get 10 different results,” said Raymond Persino, a patent lawyer who worked as an examiner from 1998 to 2005.

After patent 8,086,604 was first rejected in 2007, Apple’s lawyers made small adjustments to the application, changing the word “documents” to “items of information” and inserting the phrase “heuristic modules” to refer to bits of software code. A few years later, the inclusion of the word “predetermined” further narrowed Apple’s approach.

These changes had little substantial impact, said experts who reviewed the application for The Times. But the patent office slowly began to come around to Apple’s point of view.

Though submitting an application repeatedly can incur large legal fees, it is often effective.

About 70 percent of patent applications are eventually approved after an applicant has altered claims, tinkered with language or worn down the patent examiners.

One consequence is that patents are sometimes granted for ideas that already exist.

In 1999, for instance, two men received a patent for a crustless, sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (The J. M. Smucker company acquired the patent and used it to sue other food makers.

In 2007, after press scrutiny, federal officials canceled the patent.)

A year earlier, the patent office had awarded an Illinois company effective ownership of many of the basic systems that power the Internet. That firm sued a number of tech giants, persuading many to sign multimillion-dollar settlements, until a jury declared some of the patents invalid last year.

For Apple’s 8,086,604, the examiners finally relented last December and issued a patent.

“Apple got another warhead in its arsenal, but there’s no big invention here,” said David J. Pratt, president of M-CAM, the patent analysis firm, who analyzed the application for The Times.

The patent office declined to discuss 8,086,604. Officials pointed out that the agency’s 7,650 examiners received more than half a million applications last year, and the numbers have kept climbing.

By all accounts, there have been improvements in the patent office since David J. Kappos took over as director in 2009. In an interview, Mr. Kappos said the lengthy back-and-forth between examiners and Apple was evidence that the system worked.

“It’s called the patent office,” he said, noting that issuing patents is the agency’s job. In a statement, the agency said it had spent the last three years strengthening policies to improve patent quality. Besides, Mr. Kappos said, “we realize that only a handful of these patents will be really important.”

However, patent 8,086,604 has proved very important. In February, Apple sued Samsung in a California court, arguing that 17 of Samsung’s smartphones and tablets violated 8,086,604. In June, a judge banned sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone, validating 8,086,604 and ruling that the phone infringed on Apple’s patent because it featured a “Google quick search box” that allowed users to enter one search term, either typed or spoken, that returned results simultaneously from the Internet, contacts stored on the phone and recently visited Web sites.

(The ban has been stayed while under appeal.)

Searching for Fixes Some experts worry that Apple’s broad patents may give the company control of technologies that, over the last seven years, have been independently developed at dozens of companies and have become central to many devices.

“Apple could get a chokehold on the smartphone industry,” said Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of computer guides and a software patent critic. “A patent is a government-sanctioned monopoly, and we should be very cautious about handing those out.”

Others say the system works fine.

“Intellectual property is property, just like a house, and its owners deserve protection,” said Jay P. Kesan, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “We have rules in place, and they’re getting better.

“And if someone gets a bad patent, so what?” he said. “You can request a re-examination. You can go to court to invalidate the patent. Even rules that need improvements are better than no rules at all.”

Five years ago, Congress was debating how to fix the patent system when an inventor named Stephen G. Perlman went to Capitol Hill.

Mr. Perlman worked at Apple in the 1980s. Today, he runs a start-up incubator called Rearden in San Francisco. He holds 100 patents — including for the software behind the reverse aging in the film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — and has about 100 more applications pending.

Patents are crucial to his business, Mr. Perlman said, particularly in raising money from venture capitalists and deterring large companies from copying his innovations. “When we file a patent application, it’s a big deal,” he said.

When Mr. Perlman went to Congress, he brought ideas to protect small inventors. He wasn’t alone in suggesting solutions. Thousands of companies, from start-ups like Vlingo to large technology firms, have argued that a well-functioning patent system is essential to their success.

The problems with the current system are so pervasive, they say, that the courts, lawmakers and Silicon Valley must find their own fixes.

One option is judicial activism. This year, Judge Posner, in an Illinois federal court, tossed out patent arguments made by both Apple and Motorola Mobility in a 38-page opinion that dismissed a lawsuit between the two companies. Cleaning up the patent mess, Judge Posner said in an interview, might also require reducing the duration of patents on digital technologies, which can be as long as 20 years. “That would make a big difference,” he said. “After five years, these patents are mainly traps for the unwary.”

Ideas have also come from policy experts and Silicon Valley. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently published a working paper calling for the abolition of patents, saying they do more harm than good.

Another idea is to create different classes of patents, so that some kinds of inventions, like pharmaceuticals, would receive 20 years of ironclad protection, while others, like software, would receive shorter and more flexible terms.

A third suggestion was made by the Internet company Twitter, which released an “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” this year intended to give software engineers some control over how their creations are used. Under the terms of the agreement, companies pledge that patents will be used only for defensive purposes.

“We’re just trying to do something modest,” said Benjamin Lee, Twitter’s legal counsel.

Similarly, law school faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, have proposed a “Defensive Patent License” in which companies would contribute patents to a common pool that shielded participants from litigious aggressors. Companies would be allowed to participate as long as they did not become first-strike plaintiffs. The benefit is that “you don’t have to worry about your patent being weaponized” and used to attack competitors, said Jason M. Schultz, an assistant professor who helped design the license.

But to really make a difference, such ideas require the participation of large technology companies, and the incentives to cooperate are small. So some frustrated engineers have become outspoken advocates for reform.

Mr. Perlman, the independent inventor, for instance, was hopeful his voice would be heard on Capitol Hill. But alongside Mr. Perlman were hundreds of lobbyists from high-tech corporations and the pharmaceutical industry, which often push conflicting proposals. Big technology companies, in general, want to limit the financial damages juries can award for minor patent violations, while drug makers want to make sure they can sue for billions of dollars if a single patent is violated.

These and dozens of other narrow battles have paralyzed Congress’s ability to make real changes, lawmakers and lobbyists say. The last attempt, the America Invents Act, which was passed last year, achieved mostly administrative fixes, like making it easier for outsiders to challenge a patent’s validity.

The new law did make one fundamental change. Since the patent system was overseen by Thomas Jefferson, the United States has awarded ownership of an innovation to whoever created the first prototype, a policy known as “first to invent.” Under the America Invents Act, ownership will be awarded to whoever submits the first application, or “first to file.”

The shift, inventors like Mr. Perlman say, makes life harder for small entrepreneurs. Large companies with battalions of lawyers can file thousands of pre-emptive patent applications in emerging industries. Start-ups, lacking similar resources, will find themselves easy prey once their products show promise.

That is the concern of people like Mr. Phillips, the voice recognition specialist and one-time Siri partner who founded Vlingo. “Start-ups are where progress occurs,” he said in an interview. “If you spend all your time in court, you can’t create much technology.”

In June, Mr. Phillips started work at his new employer, and former courtroom adversary, Nuance. Theoretically, his job was to help manage the companies’ integration and find new technological frontiers to explore. With a background at M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative thinkers in computer speech.

But he spent much of the summer on vacation, recuperating from the last six bruising years. And in September, he quit. He plans to leave voice recognition altogether, he has told friends, and find an industry with less treacherous patent terrain.