The old Brasserie was a bit like the bargain-basement version of the Four Seasons, the place you went if you wanted a whiff of Seagram Building sophistication but didn't have the money, or the time, to indulge in the Big Experience upstairs. It was somewhere between a coffee shop and a real restaurant, but in the years after its opening in 1959 the Brasserie did manage somehow to establish a certain aura, probably as much for the glamour of being open around the clock as for anything about its design or its food. It was hardly a real French brasserie, but on the other hand, this wasn't a diner on Queens Boulevard, either.

By the Eighties the Brasserie was feeling very tired, but Restaurant Associates, the company that created it (along with the Four Seasons, which it sold in 1973), kept plodding along, hoping, I suppose, that the cycle of chic would turn and a Sixties-Modern place in a midtown office building serving vaguely French food all night would again seem fashionable. It didn't happen. Instead, a fire in 1995 closed the place down. Restaurant Associates began to make plans to fix the Brasserie up and try again, pushing Philip Johnson's original design toward something traditional, but it didn't count on Phyllis Lambert, the architect, architectural patron, and founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Lambert is the force behind the Seagram Building--it was she who persuaded her father, Samuel Bronfman, in the 1950s to fire Charles Luck-man and hire Mies van der Rohe instead to build his company's headquarters on Park Avenue--and nearly half a century later she still serves as the building's aesthetic conscience. Her role is more than ceremonial. By the terms of the deal under which Seagram sold the building some years ago, Lambert has the right to review any alteration plans for the building's exterior or public spaces. And she did not like what Restaurant Associates had in mind.

Lambert figured the time had come for something else, and she gave Restaurant Associates a list of architects whose work she admired. The company chose Diller + Scofidio, perhaps on the premise that if it had to be daring, it might as well go all the way, and commissioned them to rethink the Brasserie from scratch. Everything could change but
the name.

And everything has. The startling thing, however, is how comfortable, how right, the new Brasserie seems. Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio had never designed a restaurant before--actually, they haven't built much of anything, save for art installations and video and multimedia projects--but they seem to have figured out instantly what to do with a second-rate space in a first-rate building to make it feel entirely new and yet right for its venerable surroundings. Diller and Scofidio call themselves dissident architects, but that seems, on the basis of this work, to be nonsense. The new Brasserie isn't as radical as you think it is going to be: It isn't anti-architectural, and it isn't overburdened with theory. It is a lively, visually exciting, slightly-too-noisy room that has exactly the frisson that the original Brasserie did, updated to feel right for exactly the moment. This restaurant could not be more different from the old Brasserie, and yet in a strange way it feels the same, or at least it feels the same as I remember the Brasserie feeling when I first saw it sometime in the Sixties: a place with energy and a bit of dazzle that seemed to have been conceived with intelligence and discipline.

Diller and Scofidio, who are the first architects to have won a MacArthur Fellowship, talk a lot about the video screens that they have placed over the bar, which show a constantly changing array of images of people entering the restaurant. Presumably this says something about the act of entrance and about the way in which that moment is given symbolic importance in the theatrical experience of dining. It's a nice conceit, but a conceit nonetheless. I like the wall behind the bar much better--a monumental sheet of translucent glass into which bottles have been placed in such a way so that they seem to float horizontally. It is visually spectacular, and because the bottles look slightly out of focus behind the etched glass it becomes a cunning and subtle comment on the nature of drinking and perception.

Almost everything in this restaurant looks good and is comfortable. Because the space is half a level below the street, patrons have always entered the Bras-serie by descending a staircase. Diller and Scofidio have turned the original staircase into something more, making it a measured sequence of translucent floating treads, stretched out straight into the center of the room. The main dining room has a wood floor and curving wood panels, in layers, coming up the side walls and onto the ceiling, but the warmth and texture of the wood are balanced by translucent tables of resin, by the huge translucent wall behind the bar, and by a set of six booths on the side, clearly the prime locations. The booths are marked by a series of parallel walls of tufted green leather, slanted at an angle so that the right side of each booth uses the wall as a seatback, while the left side has a bench slid in. There is a secondary dining room off to the side, behind the bar, that is somewhat more intimate, and it glows with a warm light.

The chairs are familiar favorites from the Fifties, here elevated to a certain seriousness--you have to do something to counter those Brno chairs Philip Johnson used upstairs in the Four Seasons--but it is the resin tables and the staircase and the bar wall that make the room a kind of exploration of translucency. Mies in the Seagram Building and Johnson in the Four Seasons were exploring a kind of sumptuous luxury, trying to prove that it could be achieved with modern materials and a certain degree of restraint; sensuousness, not transparency, was their theme, and I'm not sure how much Diller and Scofidio have broken away from that, since their interest in translucency here is really another way into sensuous experience.

It says something about this moment in design that the restaurant feels serene, but it does, oddly enough. The Brasserie is not an avalanche of images, coming at us from all directions (even the video screens over the bar show frozen images, not moving ones). There is a constancy of vision here that might, in another age, have even been called an aesthetic. What puzzled me about the Brasserie was not the space itself, but the reputation Diller and Scofidio have always had for being so radical. This room is full of a love of objects and textures and surfaces and light. It has an edge, but it isn't all edge. It is sharp and crisp and absolutely of the moment, and yet it has a calmness that comes, I think, from the fact that it is a resolved, fully thought-out whole. For architects who have spent a lot of time talking about dematerialization and about the obsolescence of traditional kinds of space, they've made what, by their standards, has to be considered a wonderful, old-fashioned room.

What a glorious subject--what a forlorn book. This is a collection of 14 essays that Mark Lamster, senior editor at Princeton Architectural Press, reckons fit within one of three broad areas of approach: the depiction of architects in films and documentaries; the creation of "on-screen architecture," sets, or settings; and "Visions of the World," or "how filmmakers have used the built environment to reflect their ideas about the societies in which they live."

Most of the writers are academics in architecture or art history, and the writing is clear but distant and impersonal. There is one essay by a location manager --someone who finds places that might be suitable for movie settings. Another is by Bob Eisenhardt, who had the awkward but fascinating task of serving as editor and codirector (with Albert Maysles and Susan Froemke) on Concert of Wills, the documentary about the vexed compromises in the building of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. My hopes lifted when I saw the promise of that much direct testimony on design problems, but I noticed that there was nothing in the book by a production designer, an art director, a set decorator--or even a movie director. There is only one essay by anyone known as a film writer--Donald Albrecht's piece on Ken Adam, the German-born designer who settled in England and became associated with Stanley Kubrick and the James Bond films.

But my alarm bells went off as early as line 15 of Lamster's introduction to the book, where he writes, "Filmmakers, with the help of production designers, art directors, location managers, and countless other members of cast and crew insert architecture into their films." "Insert"--as if architecture were flowers meant to brighten up the place.

I put the proofs down in dismay and went to the VCR, which happened to have Michael Mann's Heat loaded. Let me try to describe what I saw and felt as a way of defining the sedate yet restricted vantage of this book. Like almost all movies, Heat is a story about people that is made out of shots that are joined together with something like coherence and momentum. Even close-ups have a background--as well as an exact angle and composition. The background may be no more than a blur of color, some shapes from a domestic interior, or a cityscape. There are, crudely, two ways of making a film: You can attend to the faces--their talk and their story--and let the background stay as incidental and uncontrived as possible. (This is often the key to styles that call themselves "realistic." ) Or you can reach the conclusion that, despite such deliberate affectlessness, the audience helplessly and greedily devours the background as "information" and emotional coloring. More than that, the audience does not see people and background separately; its rich response reads the flat screen as an integrated set of forms.

We do this because the frame implies choice and composition. And so, in Heat, say, we find Al Pacino's cop at first in bed with his wife (his third wife). The shots are long-lensed: They foreshorten real space; they tend to jam the bodies, fragmented, in our face, allowing only glimpses of the untidy decor around them. There is a feeling of stolen intimacy, of rush and pressure, even before the plot teaches us that this marriage is coming apart because of the strain of the cop's work.

When we see his opponent, Robert De Niro, the criminal, in his home, it's a large, airy, cooler place: It likely had an architect, for the De Niro character exists in smart empty space with a grace that matches his higher income. But that space is also a sign of his being unattached, and we see this before he admits that if and when "the heat" comes down he has to be ready to abandon his life totally. Now I am only scratching the surface of Heat--and there are better films that have a richer or more organic sense of architecture--but I hope I've suggested how the cinema frame formalizes and relates everything it contains. A body, a hand, a face--all can be architectural once presented; the same is true of trees, rivers, and clouds. In other words, a movie is a building, but one in which the dimensions and the experience are dynamic, elastic, constantly shifting along with the shots, driven by story-telling, desire, identification, and all those things that fuel the movie-going dream.

Here is the glory I referred to, as well as film's challenging alternative to fixed or built realities. At the movies, the place we see grows and shrinks from one shot to the next as the director zooms in, zooms out, cuts, etc. Yet this is all occurring in a very controlled environment (the theater), with a fixed, flat screen and a "trapped" audience. What makes movies work so magically is the way we emotionally travel in that "impossible" space between screen and seats. I am not an architect, but I suspect this is one of the most exciting challenges in the field: How can architecture find ways of catching up with the movie audience's sense of being "in" the place seen? Movies have taught us to want buildings that bend to our desires.

There is only one essay in this book--Mitchell Schwarzer's on Antonioni--that comes close to addressing films in the way I have outlined, and it is marred by awkward writing and an inadequate treatment of the climax of The Passenger, where there is a very intricate transition from inside to outside that summarizes the spatial venture or hope of the whole film--and which touches on the idea of getting into (or out of) closed spaces. But Schwarzer is on the right track--he feels the full architectural resonance of the screen--and if there had been companion pieces on, say, Fritz Lang and Mitchell Leisen (directors who set out first to be architects), the collection might have established its seriousness and relevance.

As it is, the book opens with a dauntingly smug piece (37 pages long!) by Nancy Levinson on how foolishly Hollywood has depicted architects. Well, of course a dream medium can't be given sociological gravity. Film has a tendency to glamorize or belittle most jobs; that's a consequence of its striving to fulfill our wildest dreams. So Levinson feels superior to the literary follies of The Foun-tainhead, Strangers When We Meet, The Belly of an Architect, Indecent Proposal, and so on--as if they were only dime-store novels. The great failure in this approach is her helplessness with The Fountainhead, the cinematic workings of which are more sophisticated than Ayn Rand (its author and scriptwriter) ever knew. The Fountainhead was made by King Vidor, who treasured form and dynamics, and whose work always needs to be approached as film, not as filmed literature.

Philip Nobel has done a lengthy examination of the status of American architects in the 1940s and 1950s, and I'm sure it has value for historians. It has little to do with film, though, or with Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, its ostensible subject. But the Blandings' dream of a livable house is fascinating, and just one aspect of the way in which Hollywood sets have amounted to a kind of design for living (one reason why "poor" homes in movies are always so much larger than in reality). In turn, that could have been linked to a close account of the building of one of the great Hollywood homes--the Selznick house on Summit Drive, perhaps--and Architec-tural Digest's regular worship of the celebrity home.

This brings me to the essay I most anticipated: "Cedric Gibbons: Architect of Hollywood's Golden Age" by Christina Wilson. Gibbons ran the art department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the company's founding in 1924 to his retirement in 1956. "Between 1930 and 1957," writes Wilson, "Gibbons received eleven Academy Awards." She means 1928 and 1957, but she ought to add that only one of the 11--for The Bridge of San Luis Rey--went to Gibbons alone. The other 10 were shared with one, two, or three others. Gibbons, who was not overburdened by training, had the charm and managerial efficiency, as well as the instinct for power, to run a large department. Thus he acquired a contract that gave him credit on every MGM film--more than 1,500 in his time there.

Yes, he ran the department and liked to be re-garded as a paragon of style--and a lady-killer. He had a lot to do with the glassy, high-key MGM look--a look that most film historians have found more vulgar than the house style at Paramount or Warners. And he stole credit for work done by his more creative minions. In his book, I Remember It Well, Vincente Minnelli (arguably the MGM director with the most interest in decor) writes: "My first exposure to the art department as a director was the first in a running series of battles. It was a medieval fiefdom, its overlord accustomed to doing things in a certain way... His own." George Cukor, in his autobiography, tells essentially the same story of having to find and encourage a minion (Paul Huldschinsky) for Gaslight--a film in which the house is a leading character--and placate Gibbons.

That's one clue that official credits don't tell the truth and that every picture has to be researched. But Wilson's essay seems content with Gibbons' own version of things. I could go on. I did like, however, the essay by Bob Eisenhardt, even if he has been cautious in reporting the turmoil at the Getty. (Why not? He wants to keep working.) Albrecht is useful on Adam. The editor has contributed an interesting essay comparing the fear of urbanism in George Lucas's films with his naive dream compound, Skywalker Ranch. There is an intriguing piece by Joan Ockman on Jacques Tati's Playtime. And there is the rest. Above all, I hope that this lazy volume will not persuade architects or students that the subject has been covered. Some publisher needs to begin again. .

Eboy
Think of it as a dystopian version of Sim City, the enormously popular computer game that positions you as the mover-and-shaker in a fungible, but ultimately controllable world. Eboy's Sim-like, orthographically rendered mindscapes don't have the original game's interactivity, but they are a sobering reflection of their creators' twisted anxieties. The perpetrators, Eboy partners Steffen Sauerteig, Kai Vermehr, Sven Smital, and Peter Stemmler, peddle their playful font family--based on the geometry of pixeled-screen fonts and created especially for use on-screen and on the Web--via this unsettling site. Here, as in so much of real life, odd and unpleasant things occasionally take place in an other-wise stultifying world.

deepend
There's a dreary predictability to most design firms' online self-promotions; not so the home site for this enterprising group of British new-media evangelists. The teensy, borderline-unreadable type might seem a bit off-putting at first, but as you mouse over menus, morphing the type to a readable size, deep-end's minimalist interface gradually reveals its functionality. Further in, menus slice and dice the content every which way, so you get a look at relevant work you might not otherwise seek out--an appropriate envelope for the studio's impressive breadth of expertise. Specializing in 3-D simulations, game development, broadcast graphics, and the like, deepend has done its share of cheesy pop graphics for vapid British TV shows, but its high-end proj-ects--for example, a hyperactive setting for BBC Digital, and an ingenious promo for the humble Hoover vacuum--show a savvy sensibility at work.

Lighting.com
Billed as "the Internet community for lighting professionals," this to-the-trade destination occupies some choice online real estate--what manufacturer wouldn't like to get his mitts on that URL?--and takes advantage of it to deliver refreshingly robust content. The site has its own proprietary search engine for the rest of the Web, as well as links to lighting associations, designers, distributors, manufacturers, publications, reps, services, software, and events. There's also a short but solid list of frequently updated articles that tackle such relevant topics as seasonal affective disorder and the impact of street lighting on crime.

International Union of Architects
What is it the French don't get about the Web? This Paris-based organization's bare-bones home site makes a half-hearted attempt to publish topical information about architectural events and competitions, without being nearly comprehensive or up-to-date enough to qualify as a reliable resource. Still, there are a few useful listings, including links--some 35 in all--to architectural museums worldwide. But while the list connects to such gems as the spooky Claude-Nicolas Ledoux Museum, dedicated to the eighteenth-century visionary, it omits, for example, Sir John Soane's museum (www.soane.org), every bit as marvelous and considerably better known. Looks like we'll still have to wait for an authoritative online source for architectural culture.

Ground Control
Sometimes a Web site is the perfect match for the kind of information the Internet can deliver best, and that's the case with this "platform for young urban and landscape designers" from the Netherlands. Behind a sprightly interface, the editors muster some surprisingly well-thought-out and ably written content--most of it available in English--that zeros in on highly specific areas of discussion. So, for example, no traveler with an interest in town planning should think of visiting Barcelona, Glasgow, Milan, or Stockholm without first consulting Ground Control's opinionated, up-to-date, and informative overviews on those cities. There are also columns, a message board, active areas devoted to workshops, and a collection of research and design studies.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
When a contemporary museum is just a few blocks across town from the largest concentration of Web developers on the planet, you'd expect it to respond with a viable Internet presence. The newly revamped site for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art doesn't disappoint; its crisply detailed interface carries forward the museum's graphic identity while deftly organizing information for ease of use. The schedule for a museum the size of SFMoMA, with its many overlapping exhibition dates, is devilishly difficult to get across in print; on the Web, the site's overarching visual motif--a horizontal scroll--solves that task quite handily. The showcase for the museum's much-touted Web-site collection, e.space, gets shorter shrift. Perhaps because the half dozen or so specimens on display are all several years old--which makes them superannuated in Web time--the majority simply serve to reinforce the popular notion that Internet art is at best still an embryonic medium.

Art and Culture
This "interconnected guide to all the arts" gets off on the wrong foot with a familiar warning: you will need to have the newest Flash & Shockwave plug-in to view this site. Only you don't need the software--although you will need a late-model browser. The trouble is that after a sluggish download, you go to pages which--except for their flashy headlines--could just as well have been tooled for low-end browsers. But where Art and Culture really stumbles is in the content it delivers, a form of high-brow shovelware that covers the bases--architects from Aalto to Wright, and so forth--but offers no news. It's one of those encyclopedic endeavors that are typically compiled by overworked, undereducated content providers. This glorified data dump must be fairly new--many categories are laughably incomplete--and could improve as it builds out, but for now it's yet another start-up looking for a market, the kind that lamely tries to induce you to buy, say, a Thelonious Monk CD, when all you're after is the musician's bio.

Ken Coupland writes about art, architecture, and design for Critique, Eye, and How, among others.