As 24 hours pass on the millennium clock, an on-the-street reporter talks orifice politics.

by Ian LeBon

When something novel is added to their city, New Yorkers are generally the last people to stop on the street to notice it. Tourists look up, but locals, famously, look down (out of fear, perhaps, or the hope of finding free money) unless otherwise inspired by a fire, falling bricks, or a suicidal jumper. So it is testament to the bra-vado and perversity of a new piece of public art that it has had the power to arrest even the most jaded passersby--albeit usually out of indignation.

Rising improbably over the side of Union Square, Metronome is indeed worth a look. The piece is a nearly $3 million gift to the city from the Related Companies, developers of One Union Square, a new commercial, residential, and entertainment complex that occupies the whole block between 13th and 14th streets and Fourth Avenue and Broadway. Looking up we see, from left to right, a giant, digital clock (one side counting up to midnight, the other counting down, both flickering in the middle with shared tenths of seconds); a 100-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide, gold-flecked brick relief sculpture with a huge, ominous hole in the middle; and, off to the right, unlit and relatively discreet, a spherical moon-phase indicator that's more than five feet tall.

Most people think it sucks. Is there another way to look at it?

Metronome makes what is beyond question one of Manhattan's most enjoyably surreal tableaux. The clock numbers churn, the moon spins in its plastic bubble, and that great dark nostril flares. Occasionally, perhaps when the dew point permits, this blowhole issues a thick column of steam.

For the artists, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, winners of a Rome Prize in 1994, Metronome is a meditation on time. Two times, really: the ticking pace of New York life and that other, natural world of slower tocks. The grandiose names given to each element underline this conceit: the clock is "The Passage"; the brick wall is "The Vortex"; the central hole is "The Infinity"; a colossal, gesturing hand above it is called "The Relic"; a shipwrecked boulder below has been baptized "The Matter"; and a 67-foot-long bronze flügelhorn is, of course, "The Focus."

Everything one would need to demystify the work is available on the Web (www.metronome.related.com), but it has proven to be more fun for New Yorkers to make up their own names. The Infinity has been variously redubbed "The Orifice," "The Sphinc-ter," and, by a poet who resides nearby, "the business end of downtown that it flashes to the rest of the city."

In recognition of the 24/7 spirit of Metronome, and to celebrate this thing that has gotten so many New Yorkers looking and thinking at the same time, I spent 24 hours--midnight to midnight--at its feet. I talked to those people whom I caught trying to size up the installation.

A chronicle of these hours follows; let's call it "The Loiter."

MIDNIGHT The clock rolls over--all zeros for a split second--but a promised (daily at noon and midnight) horn tone does not sound. A Rosie Probert visiting from Wales (20-something, favoring wool) stops to declare: "I think it's trash, noise or no."
1:12 AM Very little action (it's a weeknight) until I'm joined briefly by another gawker, he under a comb-over, giving his name as Mog Edwards: "It's so dumb. It's so bad. It's amazing it exists."
1:43 AM An elaborately pierced and costumed couple passes. Polly Garter: "Bad mall art." Nogood Boyo: "Yeah. It's like so . . . suburban."
2:50 AM Online art director: "It looks like some astrological portal to a place you wouldn't want to go." Aspiring actor with undivulged day job: "I don't know. I just don't know."
4:12 AM I approach a cop, Officer Black, near the Gandhi memorial (loincloth, staff in hand). "I'm not interested in playing this game."
5:00 AM A disoriented early bird says his name is Captain Cat: "It's weird here. You walk and you walk until something like this just falls out
of the sky."
6:25 AM Breaking daylight. The thing looks best at dusk and dawn: less real than usual. A jogger, Mary Ann Sailors: "The thing is giving me cramps."
8:45 AM Even people running to work can't ignore Metronome. A butcher--they still exist?--Dylan Beynon: "I know it's awful, but I want to like it. It looks good when the steam is going." The steam's not going. NOON Sirens, car horns behind a bus blocking the intersection at 14th and Fourth, TLC on a passing boom box. No action from The Orifice. Not even a puff.
1:22 PM A girl on a junker bike--leopard bag, blue Pumas, of course--completes her seventh revolution of the square. "Totally awesome. No. It sucks. Is that what you want to hear?"
2:05 PM A design-savvy investment banker, Thomas Pugh, tries to figure it out: "The fact that it's a little inscrutable makes it interesting. I saw a thing like this at the Pompidou in Paris, but they took it away."
2:21 PM Then, as if conjured up by Pugh's remark, a French tourist named Gossamer: "It has really too much gold. It's a building from Donald Trump?"
3:15 PM Mae Rose Cottage says that Metronome almost killed her. "I was standing over there waiting to cross the street once, and the steam came out, and it made this big noise, and I jumped because I thought I was going to get hit by a truck. But then when I was looking up at it, I did almost get hit by a bus."
6:20 PM Getting dark and still no steam.
7:11 PM A group of seven armor-clad knights come around from where they've been mock battling at the north end of the square. The biggest guy is in chain mail and a doctored lacrosse helmet: "It's wack. That's it."
9:12 PM Despite the fact that the thing is at its most surreal--planes heading to LaGuardia are passing regularly over its shoulder, the digits are flashing--no one cares. A Brit passes, too fast to get a name: "That rot? Can't be bothered."
11:23 PM Slower now. Lily Smalls, a waitress at a nearby restaurant, gets out of work and waits across from the art wall for a ride. She does this every night. "The hand scares me."
11:56 PM The moon, a well-waned crescent, peeks out from behind One Union Square. A skate punk, grinding around the plaza opposite Metronome for over an hour, finally stops. He says his name is Waldo. I ask him what he thinks. "The clock? The clock is life."
MIDNIGHT Again, lots of zeros: no sound, no steam.

From a fifteenth-century Chinese treasure ship to Xanadu, FrameStore delivers motion graphics in a minute.

By Lisa Trollbäck

How do you encapsulate 1,000 years of world history in 60 seconds or less? Given the assignment of answering this daunting question, Bernard Heyes, creative director of the CNN Millen-nium documentary series, decided to use great feats of architecture to illustrate the different periods and events his program was covering. The show's computer-animated opener sweeps over sites like the Great Wall of China; the Aztec capital, Tenoch-titlán; and Chartres Cathedral, before arriving at present-day Shanghai.

The sequence was the first completed portion of the 10-hour series, which aired this fall and winter and will be shown again this summer. For Heyes and the London design office FrameStore, it was just the beginning of a much larger graphics package for CNN Millennium; the team spent a year and a half designing the more than 100 animations that are sprinkled throughout every episode, re-creating architectural and engineering marvels based on scarce historical information. Among the animations they made were a 3-D reconstruction of the twelfth-century Pueblo Bonito--an 800-room Native American complex in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico--and a lyrical animated vision, composed of more than 500 drawings, of Xanadu, the legendary pleasure dome of thirteenth-century Mongolian em-peror Kublai Khan.

But the most difficult task was the replication of a fifteenth-century Chi-nese treasure junk, says Heyes, who recently opened his own firm in London, Bernard Heyes Design, after working as a graphic designer at BBC Television for 17 years. "Ted Turner is an expert on ships, so we had to get it right." He and FrameStore relied primarily on a finely detailed but obscure book, Junks of the Yangtze. Despite their research, a little improvisation was inevitable. To re-create the massive bamboo sails, the designers found just the right texture close to home: bamboo window blinds.

A Japanese-American gallery collects 2,000 works for the millennium in mere months.

By Pilar Guzman

"A show of this scope would take a big museum four to five years," explains Gallery 91 owner Yoshiko Ebihara, who has been collecting entries from China to Spain for her "2000 Objects for the New Millen-nium" exhibition. "Because of my gallery's small size and the intimacy of the network of designers, we can organize it in a matter of months."

Gallery 91, a New York gallery dedicated to Japanese and American industrial design, is showing the results of Ebihara's international search--2,000 functional design objects, including industrial, product, graphic, architectural, fashion, textile, and craft design--in four theme-based installments through the year.

"The idea behind the show," says Ebihara, "is to record what designers are doing and thinking right now--to show the confluence of design and technology at the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next."

Despite the participation of such influential designers as Karim Rashid, Tucker Viemeister, Ikko Tanaka, and Masayuki Kurokawa, the show's novelty lies in its being accessible to everyone. "We are looking for innovators," says Ebihara, "for experimental techniques and materials from everyone, including people who are not designers by profession."

The exhibition schedule is as follows: Part one (January through February) will feature 300 or so selected works on or made of paper, including Shin Matsunaga's poster design for the exhibit. Part two (March through April) will focus on new applications of materials and techniques in product design, including works by Karim Rashid and Kawasaki Kazuo. Part three (June) will display works primarily by Japanese glass designers. The final installment will showcase environmental and digital-media designs.

For further information and online purchases, visit the Gallery 91 Web site

by Amy Goldwasser

Levi's new Red jeans could be mistaken for, say, a street vendor in a former Soviet-bloc village's sorry attempt to re-create the American classic, based solely on observing backpackers in the real thing. Almost all the telltale elements are there--the utilitarian denim, the little red tag, the watch pocket, the button- or zipper-fly, the stitching where the waistband tag might have fallen off--only they're amiss. Compared to the familiar standard, the cut is more generous, the side seams are twisted inward, the back pockets are lower and tilted--and wait, that little red tag doesn't even say "Levi's." But these organic-yet-somehow-futuristic blue jeans are no bootleggers' special. They are the post-modern vision of the master denim company.

"We looked at the issue as, eIf the 501 never existed again, what elements would we want it to carry forward,'" says Caroline Parent, the Brussels-based creative director for Levi Strauss, about the team of 17 designers who came up with Red. "We took different aspects and twisted them. So maybe the pockets in back look weird and wrong--I don't care. Maybe they don't make your butt look so great, but somehow the way they are placed is redefining what a pocket on a jean means."

One of the things Red's low-pocket, high-concept design means to Levi's is that the company is choosing to sell the line in boutiques--with displays by Droog Design, no less--rather than in their usual, wall-of-denim Levi's stores, for $128 to $140. The jeans have been selling out in about two hours in Europe. As Parent says, "Everyone has always loved denim. Bring new life to it, and people are excited."

by Dan Koeppel

It looked like your typical military cemetery. Plain markers solemnized manicured bluegrass. All traces of the brutality the place once witnessed had been eradicated. "There was no hint of the unimaginable," says Mark Johnson, a designer with the National Park Service, which administers the Andersonville National Historic Site in central Georgia. Andersonville was home to one of the Civil War's most notorious POW camps. Thousands died here under conditions "worse than hell," says Johnson.

Congress commissioned a museum at the site that would honor POWs from every American conflict since the Revolutionary War. But there was also a need for an interpretive memorial specific to the horrors of Ander-sonville; the idea was to keep the site reverent and at the same time bring shape to what had been ignored.

As is usually the case in such circumstances, it fell to the Park Ser-vice's Harpers Ferry Center, in West Virginia, to give the national park an image makeover. Nearly 200 designers, architects, conservationists, archaeologists, and artisans at Harpers Ferry operate together as a full-service design shop, handling everything from restoration to multimedia. "We're the studio," says the center's assistant manager, Phil Musselwhite, "and the 378 parks are the clients."

At Andersonville, which was re-furbished last year, the Harpers Ferry designers pushed for a look that would reflect a more frank acceptance of war's reality. "We wanted to highlight the site's intensity," says Johnson.

An early notion to dig up old trenches--possibly yielding bones and personal effects--was eventually dropped. "People expect formality," says Johnson, "even if it gets in the way of interpretation." The designers finally settled on wayside markers using the park service's trademark grid, created in the 1970s by Massimo Vignelli. Rare glass-plate photo-graphs and drawings by prisoners were reproduced, and a portion of an old stockade was restored. A row of white pylons now outlines the camp's vanished perimeter. "It's a kind of expressive minimalism," Johnson says. "Like a haiku."

A Q & A with Ben Katchor, whose comic strip of twin buildings became something to dance to.


Comic strip artist Ben Katchor was approached last year by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe--founders of the new music festival Bang on a Can--to collaborate on an opera commissioned by Italy's Settembre Musica festival. The resulting piece, The Carbon Copy Building, after a 1998 Metropolis strip of the same name, premiered in Turin in Sep-tember and ran at the Kitchen in New York in October.

Katchor has contributed comics to Metropolis since 1995. His strip "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" ran in alternative papers nationwide for more than 10 years from 1988 and was compiled in a book; last year, Random House published Katchor's illustrated historical romance, The Jew of New York.

Writer David Krasnow spoke to Katchor about the unusual opera.

David Krasnow: The Carbon Copy Building is about a pair of twin structures in an unnamed metropolis: the Palatine, a well-preserved Deco gem, and the Palaver, located in the "bent spoon district," which has been renovated by "semi-licensed contractors." This is unusual material even for a comic strip--how did it become an opera?
Ben Katchor: The composers realized it should have sort of a New York-urban theme, and somehow they thought comics had something to do with that. They knew my work.
DK: Had you worked with music before?
BK: I once did a series of radio cartoons that had original scores. It was discouraging to me that people always thought of period music for my strips--1940s jazz or 1950s cha-cha. These composers, their music is ahistorical. It has references to every place in the world, but it's not period music.
DK: When you drew this strip, did you have a longer treatment in mind?
BK: Actually I gave the composers a pile of strips, and they chose it. So I expanded the story and said, "Here's more text than you can ever use." Several months later, the musical numbers existed. After that, I made the drawings that were projected onto scrims during the show.
DK: Where did you come upon the carbon copy building as a subject?
BK: There are a few in New York--apartment buildings. The developers would use the same plans. I've read about them. Haven't visited any.
DK: Are you up on architectural history?
BK: No. I don't consider myself an expert on New York. I live here, and I know how to evoke the place in comics.
DK: The period-accurate Palatine is depicted very glamorously, while the Palaver is literally cursed--"an inky, blue-black substance" poisons its inhabitants. Most of your strips have celebrated workaday, architecturally neglected places. Has recent development in the city changed your feelings about the need to preserve deliberately?
BK: It's an economic boom right now, so there's more activity. I love coming by some place and the whole corner will be gone.
DK: And you don't miss the old corner?
BK: I do, but I miss a lot of things. I miss people who die. I miss who I was at a particular time and place. But there hasn't been wholesale development in this city in my lifetime. A lot of neighborhoods are very much as they were when I was here 20 years ago. You go to Europe and there are museum center cities; they're stagnant. I like to see that as a tourist. But I wouldn't want to live there. You feel trapped in the past.

by Carly Berwick

Soon after graduating from Stanford in 1994 with a double major in math and software engineering, James Doornbus landed a programmer's dream job: playing God.

After working for Maxis, the Silicon Valley company behind cult favorite SimCity, he was quickly tapped by that game's creator and lead designer, Will Wright, to begin programming for a new project. It would go beyond SimCity--in which players build a city from the ground up, from instal-ling pipes to constructing skyscrapers--to let users create people.

The new game, The Sims, didn't begin with such almighty aims. It was originally conceived of as an "architectural simulation," but it mushroomed over seven years of development. The point of The Sims, which hits stores this month, is to build not only a virtual house from scratch but also the characters to fill it, choosing from nearly a half-dozen personality traits--extroversion, for example, or neatness--and eight basic needs, from "bladder" to "social."

As head designer, Wright provided a broad vision of the game; Doornbus's mandate, as lead programmer, was to fill in the details. "I started doing iterative design on it," Doornbus says. Iterative design is simply a step-by-step process that allows the programmer to play with individual pieces of the game to see if they'll work. Doornbus would ask himself questions to be answered by this early design--whether, for example, users would be able to move the figures around directly. He tried connecting keyboard controls to the characters' right and left legs. But in the end, he says, "It was too difficult to drive someone around like that." In the final version, players control movement by choosing actions such as "order a pizza" and "throw a party."

Instead of the details of walking or sitting, the game focuses on the infinite capacity of humans to plan, scheme, and plot for upward mobility. The Sims has no goal other than to help your household be successful: to make money, stay employed, and maybe even save enough cash to buy a pool or add on a wing. Once the game is shipped, users will be able to download additional objects and traits from a Sims Web site, including designs for rugs, floors, and walls, as well as character "skins," including clothing and physique.

A problem he's still confronting, says Doornbus, is the seemingly simple action of inviting a friend over to your Sims house. "You could, for example, ask that friend to move in. But what happens then to the house the person lived in?" It's the responsibility of the programmer to consider all these avenues and dead ends. Because of issues surrounding aging, for example, characters do not get older (except for babies, who can become kids).

After about three years of working on code by himself, Doornbus was put in charge of a team of three programmers. In the push to get the game out, that team grew to eight. With the long process coming to a close, Doornbus still imagines changes he might have made. But in a game, he acknowledges, there's something to be said for stopping short of presenting human-kind in all its complexity. "If it got too realistic, it probably wouldn't be fun. It would be depressing."

by Akiko Busch

Nothing lasts forever. We all know this, yet we spend much of our time thinking otherwise. And good design, like other adventures in the sublime, can reaffirm your faith in the impossible. Charles Eames touched on this in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1971. Eames was talking about goods--a bolt of cloth, a hank of rope, a ball of twine, a keg of nails, a ream of paper--calling these "the new covetables" and referring to their "beautiful mass of stuff, which, like a barrel of apples, you think are going to go on forever."

It is the bolt of cloth that concerns us here. Through a collaboration with the Eames Office in Venice, California, Maharam, the Manhattan-based contract textile company, is bringing to market a new collection of textiles originally designed by Charles and Ray Eames for the Museum of Modern Art's 1947 "Competition of Printed Textiles" exhibit. The four patterns are called "Crosspatch," "Circles," "Small Dot Pattern," and "Dot Pattern," and they are the first installment of a series of Modern classics that the company will be introducing. Plans are afoot to produce textiles designed by Gio Ponti, Alex-ander Girard, and Verner Panton. "Mid-century Modernism gave us an aesthetic of lasting value," says company president Michael Maharam. "We hope to provide a home for these designs."

Mary Murphy, vice president and director of design at Maharam, worked closely with Lucia Eames, Charles's daughter, to produce the current collection. Together they adapted the Eameses' ink-and-paper drawings and construction-paper cutouts to determine the scale and color combinations for the new collection, and the four patterns are now available in 27 color variations. As Murphy observes, "Lucia was extremely respectful of their work, she didn't second-guess Charles and Ray."

Mary and Lucia devised a kind of game--an appropriate decision, as Charles and Ray were themselves celebrated for their spontaneity and improvisation. Circles, for example, was adapted from the original collage submitted to the MoMA. The two women worked at the Eames Office, housed in the Eameses' celebrated 1949 residence. Toward the end of the process, they laid out the color selections on the walkway, an image that evokes children using colored chalk to draw hopscotch courts and other games on sidewalks in front of their houses.

There was a purpose to the strategy. "The important part to me was to look at the colors in the house," explains Lucia. "We laid the colors out in different combinations, along with the china, silver, folk art, all the candles, all these things that are still in the house that Charles and Ray treasured. Things just had to feel right in terms of the house." That things did and do feel right is especially clear when she speaks of the "joy and rigor" that attended the design process--it would be hard to think of two more essential guidelines for play.

Lucia Eames says that working on this collection was a way to reflect on the interactive partnership that Charles and Ray had. "They did furniture, fabric, film," she says, "and so much more. They didn't stop and start. They lived design." And if what they did wasn't infinite, certainly it was seamless, sufficient, and sustaining. As Charles Eames said, "Somehow or another, a bolt of cloth comes under a heading of those goods that people lay great store in."