Marshall Berman, author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air and, most recently, Adventures in Marxism (Verso, 1999), teaches political theory and urbanism at the City University of New York. He reviews Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project for Metropolis.

Hugh Eakin is an editor at ARTnews and was a 1999 Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Berlin. He plays the viola and lives in Brooklyn. His report on Omar Akbar's efforts to invent a new Bauhaus begins on page.