Live music lends vitality to any room, but finding the right spot for a baby grand can pose a design dilemma that even the masters find challenging.

At the Cedar Rock house in Quasqueton, Iowa, architect Frank Lloyd Wright went so far as to ask the Steinway Company to customize one of its pianos so it wouldn’t overpower the room. You may not need to take such bold measures if you follow these tips for maintaining a sense of harmony between the instrument and your home.

Stay in tune

When assessing a likely spot, take a look at environmental factors that will affect the instrument’s performance. Remember, pianos are made mostly of wood and have as many as 4,500 moving parts, so before placing the piano, pay close attention to fireplaces, doors to the outside, and even heating and air-conditioning vents. Changing temperatures may cause a piano to slip out of tune, but the real enemy is a fluctuating level of humidity. Ideally, the room’s relative humidity should be between 40 and 50 percent. If the humidity of your local climate varies widely, ask a piano dealer about high-tech humidity controls that can be installed inside the piano.

Direct sunlight can also cause problems. In addition to slight expansion and contraction of the wood caused by the sun’s heat, too much exposure to ultraviolet rays can cause a piano’s finish to fade.

Sound advice

How a piano sounds depends both on how it is tuned and on the acoustics of the room in which it is played. Too many hard surfaces can make a piano sound "bright," as the higher frequencies bounce from surface to surface. Dampening some of the sound with carpeting will make the instrument seem quieter and take the edge off the upper octaves. If you have hardwood floors, simply put an area rug under the piano. Draperies and wallpaper also offer modest sound-dampening qualities.

A lesson in scale

Because they are large, pianos tend to be the focus of the room. But a big dark piano doesn’t have to steal the show. To add balance, consider another hefty piece of furniture on an opposite wall. Bookshelves, an armoire, or even large paintings can round out the ensemble and add balance to the room by filling vertical space. Since pianos are typically dark in color, you’ll want to keep the room’s colors fairly light to prevent it from feeling cramped.

A fresh vision and a love for French culture inspired Lillian and Ted Williams, classicists and home restorers, to return an abandoned folie in Normandy, France, to the condition that made the structure a "jewel in a wheat field" during the halcyon days before the French Revolution. The Chateau de Morson, built in 1750 for the Marquis de Morson, is one of the few remaining folies in France. The gentlemen’s getaways were frequently a target for revolutionaries seeking to destroy any lingering symbols of the aristocracy. The folies not ruined by political action have been ravaged by the elements, Lillian Williams notes: "This house was not built to survive 200 years, it was built as a whim." The Chateau de Morson is unusual not only for its survival in the face of adversity, but also for its location in the Normandy countryside–most folies were found on the outskirts of Paris and Bordeaux, perfect locations for city-dwelling gentlemen to escape for an afternoon’s dangerous liaison.

When the Williamses entered the abandoned dwelling in Normandy for the first time, they saw a dramatic parlor with 14-foot ceilings and graceful glass doors overlooking fields of wheat. Struck by the beauty, they instantly decided to purchase the nobleman’s playhouse. "It took us 20 seconds to buy and 10 years to restore it. If we hadn’t bought it, it would have fallen down," Lillian says.

As Americans in France, the Williamses join the ranks of legendary interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and novelist Edith Wharton as Francophile owners of folies. What is taken for granted as a French ruin by many natives is rediscovered as a treasure with the fresh, appreciative eyes of Americans, Lillian observes. "I think the Americans have made their impact," she says. In the American style, the couple also brings the do-it-yourself ethic to the Continent. "We used more of our imagination and less of others’," Lillian explains. The walls are hand-painted and fabrics are selected based on her studies of ceramics and extensive knowledge of 18th-century art and textiles, which she uses to design fabric and wallpaper for the likes of Manuel Canovas. A large amount of the repair and refurbishment work on the manor was completed by Ted Williams.

Following the original intent of the frolicsome folie, Williams has decorated with a collection of game tables.

Other items include hunting horns and dueling swords. "I’m opposed to dueling, but I like to think these were used to protect the honor of a lady" she says. The game tables serve many purposes today, just as they did in the home’s first heyday The cabriole-leg pieces serve as dining and recreation areas for the Williamses throughout the house in 18th-century style. "Living in this house is like living in the 18th century," Lillian notes.

IT’S A CLASSIC: The curvy, cabriole-leg table was a must-have in wealthy 18th-century French homes and remains popular. It was originally designed as a table for gaming and dining. Here, the cabriole–a stylized form of an animal’s leg–is featured on a table en crachoir: a piece with a deep rim edge, meant to keep games and food from slipping off the table.

IT’S A CLASSIC: The fauteuil chair first appeared in France during the Louis XV period in the 18th century. The open-sided piece, created to suit the fashions of the day, was an instant success and quickly became a fixture in formal rooms throughout the nation. The upholstered chair, now an international favorite, can be identified by its deep, rounded back, spacious seat, and cabriole legs. Frequently, the fauteuil features padded arms, as seen here.

I already miss the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street. It may be four years before Renzo Piano’s architectural wonder, the new world headquarters for the Times, is built, but I’m already nostalgic for the place where I have worked for the past 28 years, and where I thought I’d work for just as many more. Most of my colleagues eagerly anticipate moving around the corner to 40th and 8th, but not me. I prefer the small Times lobby with its sweeping marble staircase, Deco-styled appointments, and curtained windows above the revolving door to Piano’s proposed commercial atrium–the so-called democratic space-that will doubtless be less intimate and remind me less of Loretta Young.

This old Times building is my second home. The prospect of a larger, more beautiful, more public building that will accommodate other tenants does not fill me with delight. I like things as they are: worn, venerable, and comfortable. To confirm these prejudices, I stopped by the new Conde Nast building across the street, which is clean, cold, and corporate. It may be fine for a mega-publishing conglomerate, but for not my hometown paper.

The Times is not a faceless enterprise, and our edifice is not a monument to corporate power. In the long-awaited 42nd Street Redevelopment tower-play, the existing Times building, which looks like a Loire Valley chateau, is, admittedly, an anachronism. But as Times Square becomes the electronic media park of the world–the site of Viacom, ABC, MarketSite, Conde Nast, and Reuters–and with the World Wrestling Federation themestaurant on our corner, the building is now an anchor securing tradition and continuity. Moving into Piano’s post-postmodern skyscraper seems almost as unthinkable as eliminating the Latin Condensed typeface from the Times’s front page. Latin, a 19th-century vestige, is the Times’s typographical signature; it has survived many shifts in graphic styles. Similarly, this building with its baroque ornamentation is a symbol of the Times’s continued excellence. Although The Daily News and the New York Post exchanged their historic old office buildings for bland new ones, neither paper has the Times’s legacy of eminence, and both probably benefited from the new scenery (now if only they’d change their editorial policies–but I digress). This old building is filled with so much pride one can feel it in the communal spaces–lobby, elevators, and cafeteria. Here the walls do talk; I can’t imagine what the new place will say.

I am not a cranky opponent of change. I have occupied three offices since joining the Times. The first was in the enormous incandescently lit art department, where waist-high mahogany partitions separated more than 20 long rows of narrow tables punctuated by rusty metal flat files. Void of such amenities as ergonomic chairs and tables, this space remained unchanged from the 1930s through the 1970s and was in desperate need of renewal. From there I happily moved into a renovated semiprivate office that had been carved out of a mammoth old photo studio. Finally, I shifted into a slightly larger modern warren with a sliver of window facing north, where I have remained–and where my belongings have multiplied–for almost 15 years. I was sanguine through the demolition of the hot-metal composing room, elimination of the Museum of the Printed Word, renovation of the now-defunct Sunday department, and construction of the grand duplex newsroom. I am certainly able to accept change without experiencing the existentia l nausea of longing.

But it is not change that makes me object to Piano’s building, it is the anticipated loss of community. No matter how beautiful Piano’s design, the old building, like the fabled TV bar Cheers, is a place where everyone knows your name (or at least your face). In the new quarters I predict there will be such a throng of transient faces that intimacy will be lost. I saw it at the Conde Nast headquarters and at office buildings throughout midtown Manhattan where people drift without a sense of place and the joy that comes from belonging. This is exactly what the old Times building gives me-belonging–whether I’m aware of it or not.

Exchanging our small hotel-like lobby for an exclusive and separate bank of elevators in a shared entryway (or even a separate reception/waiting room as in the Time Warner building) is not my only regret. Community is not shaped by one space alone. There are so many details in this building that collectively define the space. I will miss the staircases with tile brick walls designed so that maintenance staff could easily wipe off the ink soot that once wafted up from the press and composing rooms. I will miss the modest 12th-floor veranda, where on a warm day one can eat lunch or soak up the smog-filtered sun. I will miss the inaccessible balcony outside my own window; the entrance was long ago covered over for safety reasons, but I still imagine being out there. I will miss the recently renovated formal reception room on the 15th floor, which half a century ago was a magnificent photo studio with high-pitched ceiling and skylight (there are still spirits in that room). I will miss the WQXR auditorium and so und booths, abandoned half a decade ago when the Times’s classical music station moved to new off-site quarters. I will miss the delivery room where the newspapers were transported on conveyor belts from the basement and were bundled and thrown into waiting trucks. I will miss all these remnants of things past because the old Times building is an archaeological dig–a chronicle of newspaper history and a link to the city’s rich past.

The Piano building will be a showpiece, not a home. Yet given the inevitable relocation, I must make one humble request. Rather than raze the old building, or as has been suggested, turn it into a hotel, consider the option of converting it into assisted-living quarters for old Times-persons, like me. For a while, at least, it would be one hell of a living museum.

FOR 15 YEARS, NewYork’s upscale East Side restaurant Rosa Mexicano has seduced diners with famed table-prepared guacamole and “nuclear-powered” pomegranate margaritas. When the opportunity arose in for its owner, Josefina Howard, to open a second location on Manhattan’s West Side, she approached the Rockwell Group, the architectural team behind some of NewYork’s most fashionable eateries–including Nobu, Vong, and Ruby Foo’s. The design firm’s principal, David Rockwell, who had lived in Mexico for seven years, recognized a chance to translate his close-range observations of Mexican culture into a vibrant contemporary restaurant.

The main drawback was the narrow 6,000-square-foot site, which, despite its location opposite the tourist-magnet Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, had seen little success under previous owners. Part of the problem was a duplex layout: a staircase hidden at the rear of the restaurant led to the upper floor, effectively dividing the space in two and preventing a unified, festive mood.

Rockwell first knocked a hole in the center of the upper floor and built a grand central staircase–alongside a double-height blue-tile wall with a surface of constantly trickling water-that swept down to the ground-floor entrance. The restaurant “had to be striking from Lincoln Center, and I wanted people who came in to be somewhat amazed,” says Rockwell. The 30-foot-high waterwall and the dramatic staircase, he hoped, would entice passersby from the street. He also proposed a design that was a “collision” of traditional and modern Mexican elements, bringing together the clean lines and vibrant colors of architects such as Luis Barragan and the folk-art styles found in Mexican street markets.

After gaining Howard’s approval, Rockwell began acquiring and commissioning art. The highlight is a work by Guido Grunenselder and Francesca Zwicker comprising 200 diving plaster figures pinned to the waterwall, a reference to Acapulco cliff divers who regularly plunge 100 feet into a rocky tidal channel. Around the interior walls are corn-husk-and-rose–themed mosaics by Michael Palladino (each made from 63 photographs on wax-coated tiles) and wallboxes of hammered metal tiles by Brad Oldham (containing images of pomegranates, beans, and pineapples), among other commissioned pieces.

Throughout, the restaurant is accented with vivid slabs of color and handcrafted details. In the ground-level bar and cafe area, a poured concrete floor of earth-colored squares gives way to backlit wall panels of rose petals embedded in translucent resin. In the ground-floor dining area, booths upholstered in striped fabrics are separated from the waterwall by perforated metal screens. Upstairs, to maintain low noise levels, the design team specified window fabrics and a carpet, both with brightly colored stripes.

Although the owner had requested that Rockwell tie the restaurant’s design to its festively decorated East Side counterpart, the architect felt that aping the 15-year-old original’s beguiling but more haphazard interior would have seemed self-conscious. His only concession is in the shrine-like niches in the upstairs walls, which are bathed in vivid colors and glowing light reminiscent of the cross-town precursor. Despite its distinctiveness from the original home, the new Rosa Mexicano seems to have no problems attracting customers: five months into operation, the restaurant, according to management, operates consistently at full capacity.

Peter Hall is a Brooklyn–based freelance writer. His feature on London’s Millennium Dome appeared in the September 2000 Interiors.

MELER WILSON I Rosa Mexicano maitre d’

USER’S COMMENTS

What do you like best about the space? The waterwall.

Which part of the design makes your job easier? Actually, the color aspect of it, it’s very bright. It lightens your day as soon as you walk in the door.

What would you change about this space if you could? There’s nothing I’d change. I think it’s a perfectly designed restaurant.

Well, how does it compare to other restaurants you’ve worked in? Everything is at your fingertips. Although it’s a two-story restaurant, it’s very easy to operate. If you’re upstairs you can view thew hole room from the maitre d’ stand. There’s not really a bad table in the house. Sometimes when I come in, I sit in a table to get a view of what the customers see.

What sort of reaction do you get from customers? “The waterwall is incredible!” Stuff like that. A lot of people like the cliff divers. A lot of people ask, “Who’s the architect? Is it David Rockwell?”

THE NASDAD stock exchange cannot be found on Wall Street, nor on any other street. The company’s corporate offices are near the government regulators in Washington, while its computers hum in a cool, dim facility in Connecticut. But as a stock market without a trading floor, Nasdaq wanted a three-dimensional ad for its tech-friendly brand, a space the public would recognize as the exchange’s home. In an age when financial news is both information and entertainment, “we had two audiences,” says Jorge Szendiuch, design principal on the project for Einhorn Yaffee Prescott. “One was the broadcast audience” that follows the market on TV, he explains. “The other was the audience on the street.”

And not just any street. Nasdaq found a home for its MarketSite–the hint of Internet-speak is surely intentional–in a prominent corner of Times Square, the urban crossroads where edifice and information meet. There, in the fall of 1998, it leased the first two floors of the corner drum of the Conde Nast building, then under construction, as well as the titanic sign above. New York–based EYP was hired to carve a broadcast studio, public exhibition space, and corporate facilities from the 25,000 square feet below what would become an instantly iconic billboard: a virtual home for a virtual stock exchange.

In late 1998, EYP embarked on the design-build project with a drop-dead deadline of New Year’s Eve, 1999. The initial budget was around $20 million, but that amount was contingent on the vagaries of the budget for the whole building. “We could not be rigid,” says Szendiuch. “We had to have a clear idea, but we had to be able to improvise as we went along.”

In fact, EYP’s design, created in collaboration with Harout Dedeyan, designer of Nasdaq’s original broadcast facilities in downtown Manhattan, was guided by two clear ideas. The first was to exploit Nasdaq’s real estate at the “Crossroads of the World.” To that end, EYP rejected the initial design for an exterior of columns with glass-filled openings. For maximum transparency, the designers opted instead for the Pilkington system of glass panels held in place by invisible cables. The manic streetscape seems to pour into the interior, while from the street, nothing obscures the 20-foot-tall stock-tracking video wall that backs Nasdaq’s ground-floor TV studio. “It’s not unlike a sign in Times Square,” says Szendiuch. “It’s just inside.”

The second idea was to work off the strong form of the exterior drum. The designers did this in part by removing a portion of the second floor and adding a circular mezzanine to creat a multitiered glass donut. Upon entering the space, visitors walk past the security desk and around the curved back wall, which is sheathed in translucent glass. The cylinder’s milky surface is broken by two clear openings, one of which reveals the broadcast control booth. The other, a transparent ribbon at mezzanine level, exposes the banks of computers that control the video wall. “We weren’t interested in hiding the equipment,” Szendiuch says. “We wanted to highlight the technology, because that is what gives Nasdaq an identity different from the New York Stock Exchange.” MarketSite certainly accomplishes this objective, playing on the contemporary culture surrounding the Nasdaq brand and the neighborhood surrounding the building. The project not only blurs the line between inside and out, but confounds the differences betwe en information, entertainment, technology, and commerce–like Times Square itself.

Debra Goldman is a New York-based writer specializing in consumer culture.

USER’S COMMENTS

ZRCH SMITH I Tourist, Los Angeles, CA

What do you like best about the Nasdaq interior? It’s visually captivating.

Would you want to work there? Sure.

You wouldn’t feel overloaded being there all day? Doesn’t look like overload; it looks like command control.

What would you change about it? I’d have it hooked up to VR goggles so I could just sit there and! wouldn’t have to look anywhere; I could just stare straight ahead.

Do you play the stock market? Yeah, I do. But you said it just right: play the game. It’s a game.

Does this make you want to invest more in the stock market? No, but it definitely makes me want to look at it. It’s more interactive.

Do you think the interior meshes with the outside of the building, with the new Times Square? Sure, and it shows where you are on the outside of the building [through a closed-circuit TV]. It’s beautiful. It makes me want to come back tomorrow and go in when it’s running.

IF DESIGN EVER revived a lifeless building, it would be hard to find a better example than Venture House. This rehabilitation and recovery facility for the mentally ill has occupied a former funeral home in Jamaica, New York, since the fall of 1999. Once a forbidding place where souls rested en route to the next world, it now bustles with people eager to advance their lot in this one.

Venture House hired the New York architectural firm Thanhauser + Esterson to transform the site into a welcoming environment where patrons acquire vocational skills after receiving medical treatment offsite. The organization is modeled on a “clubhouse” concept developed about 50 years ago by Fountain House, a pioneering facility in Manhattan that helps people from all social strata learn to lead more productive lives. Venture House associate executive director Ray Schwartz explains that the design goal was “to create a space that mirrors the work setting outside and promotes a sense of belonging to the community.”

Venture House chose to gut the building, an amalgam of three small structures, and restore the exterior. Devoid of any original details, the interior had become an impossibly dark and convoluted warren of small spaces. Outside, the 1920s Romanesque facade–obscured by graffiti, canopies, and cinderblocked windows–retained little of its original dignity, rising alone on a broad avenue of car lots.

Schwartz notes that the “membership,” about 250 strong, responds best to an upbeat, easy-to-navigate setting that provides a social outlet away from home. To this end, the architects spruced up the entrance and reorganized the interior around a new centralized two-story stair hall capped by a large skylight. The hall not only increases a sense of space, but also floods the building with light and serves as an impromptu gathering spot for patients and visitors.

Working with a constrained budget of $1.1 million, the designers exploited paint treatments and sculptural forms in lieu of expensive materials. They saturated the core and circulation areas with color planes, from the golden glow of the stair hall to brightly accented banisters and doorways, then muted the hues in the surrounding workspaces. While the furniture is limited to off-the-shelf selections, custom touches such as eccentric niches and windows enliven the building and keep sight lines open into remote corners.

Open views and clear circulation promote the idea that no space is off limits. “This project did not offer great opportunity for extensive plan manipulation,” explains architect Jack Esterson. “Curves, angles, or skews would not have been appropriate. The idea was to bring in light, make sure there were very obvious pathways, and end every corridor with a window, door, or some moment of color.”

Members help with upkeep by cooking, cleaning, manning the phones, and assisting administration, so they work all over the building, not just in training rooms. Following a standard clubhouse motif, Venture House features recreational areas including a den-like lounge with sofas and a dining hall whose picture window looks out to a soon-to-be-completed garden.

Such careful design considerations have succeeded in making both members and visitors feel confident. In keeping with similar facilities around the country, the enterprise enables people with long-term illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder to achieve fulfilling lives. What might seem like just another high-minded design actually advances this goal by engaging those it serves in a productive yet protected world, an attractive microcosm from which to brave the leap to the outside.

Contributing editor Juanita Dugdale wrote about edu.com’s Boston offices for the October 2000 Interiors.

USERS’ COMMENTS

EUCHARIA MUODERE I Case Worker

PRISCR EUEE I Administrative Assistant

What is your favorite part of the space?

EM: My unit, the clerical unit, upstairs, on the second floor.

PB: We have a lovely skylight. With all the light, the building is so friendly. The colors are so warm, so inviting…so everything!

Is there anything about the space you would change? PB: Actually, it’s pretty close to perfect. We have little bits to complete, but it’s pretty livable.

What do other people say about the space?

EM: They make comments about the size, the freshness, and how everything matches. And about the skylight.

How does it compare to other facilities you’ve worked in? PB: No comparison at all.

In 1996, Pasanella + Klein Stolzman + Berg’s renovation of West 55th Street’s Shoreham Hotel turned a once-dowdy property into one of New York’s first boutique-style lodgings. The change was so successful — aesthetically and financially — that The Boutique Hotel Group, the hotel’s owners, bought an adjacent 10-story office building with the goal of more than doubling the number of guest rooms and expanding Shoreham’s public areas to include a conference room and a restaurant.

Principal Henry Stolzman wanted to retain the intimate, luminous elegance of Shoreham 1 despite Shoreham 2’s tight demands: fewer square feet per guestroom upstairs and more amenity spaces required downstairs. There was also the functional problem of fusing the two buildings into one unified structure. PKSB’s solution was to transform the ground floor into a single winding, contiguous space, with guest rooms accessible via two separate elevator banks. The second building’s street-level interiors now progress in what Stolzman calls “a sequence of light boxes,” a series of minimally lit volumes with constantly changing colors along the circulation path.

One of the highlights of the newly-expanded ground floor is the hotel’s restaurant, which anchors the 55th Street facade and blends feelings of vertical compression (from its unusually low ceiling) and horizontal openness (full-length pivoting windows open to lend the entire room an alfresco effect). Then, at the north end of the east wing’s lobby-level marble-floored corridor is the hotel’s new breakfast area and skylit meeting room. The room’s severely modernist banquet table makes a stark contrast to the textured, mirror-backed glass rear wall –a vertical “slab of ice,” as the architect describes it, which changes dramatically in varying light conditions.

Upstairs, the 94 new guest rooms provided their own logistical trials: to obtain the required number of guest rooms per floor, says Stolzman, the spaces had to be unusually constrained. While there’s no getting around– or around in –the average room’s tight dimensions, PKSB succeeded in turning the overly cozy quarters into a stylish place to crash. In cases where the mom’s square footage was under 150, including the bathroom, Stolzman turned his full attention to the bed. He calls the result his “opium bed.” Indeed, the queen-size sleepers–with built-in custom cabinetry and an Ultrasuede headboard/canopy combination that covers most of the wall space–evoke the womb-like languidity of an opium den. A supermagnified black-and-white floral photograph ornaments each headboard, adding a tonal counterpoint to the tan-and-taupe palette.

With the bathrooms, too, “we fought for every inch,” Stolzman says. Rather than drywall, translucent glass separates the bathroom from the bedroom, admitting some natural light and conserving a few precious inches of floor space. Other touches, including custom-designed stainless sinks, trimmed of excess counter space inches, and ubiquitous mirrors, fight the good fight against claustrophobia.

USER’S COMMENTS

JEFF BURGESS / Concierge

What is your favorite aspect of the hotel?

I like the lobby because of the intimate feeling, because of the way they lit it, the shapes. The lighting has subtlety; it gives you a warm feeling. The light that changes color kind of pulls you back to the bar and around.

What part of the design helps you do your job better?

The public spaces. Also, my desk is set back in the corner with a top that curves down over me. It lends itself to humor. Guests tell me, “Don’t hit your head.”

What would you change about the hotel?

I wish when they did the other side they’d done the art and lighting differently. I thin k it’s a little more bland.

What do guest comment on most?

We get complimented on the artwork, the bar, the back area. One guest, he loves our sheets. That’s why he comes here.

If you were travelling would you want to stay in a hotel like this?

I like small hotels like this one because of the personalized service and design.

THE WORKING ENVIRONMENT of tomorrow can be glimpsed in Herman Miller’s recently completed showroom at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago–and it’s a far cry from the boxy, cramped, ineptly furnished cubicles found in many offices today. Instead, shimmering screens tethered to steel poles cleave the room’s wide-open spaces into honeycomb-shaped cells, furnished with workstations that future inhabitants can easily reconfigure. This is the company’s new Resolve system, and the showroom was designed to accommodate it. “Everything is so integrated,” says Rick Duffy, vice-president of Herman Miller’s Genesis design team, “that it’s hard to separate our product from the architecture of the space.”

Like the company’s furniture, the showroom is sleek, inventive, flexible, and multifunctional. Slim floor-to-ceiling glass panes form the zigzagging picture window that divides the showroom from the Mart’s prosaic hallway. As Mark Sexton, principal at Krueck & Sexton Architects and the job’s project architect, says, “It’s completely clear and doesn’t distort the furniture, yet it manipulates light and color to add a sense of activity and energy to the space.”

Alongside this wall are a built-in freestanding reception desk, clusters of Herman Miller furniture–including celebrated Eames pieces as well as the Resolve system–and a gleaming, spacious kitchen for use by employees and customers. The area is backed by another riveting expanse of glass, a series of partitions that nearly span the showroom’s 200-foot width. These walls, each made of three large panels of etched glass shingled together with pins and posts of stainless steel, enclose four conference rooms that occupy the showroom’s middle zone. Inside, the ceilings are equipped with recessed colored lights that wash the glass walls in subtle, shifting hues.

Beyond the conference rooms is a third area, open except for support columns, which makes up half of the showroom’s total square footage. Here, the company shows its contract and residential offerings. A three-dimensional geometric grid clings to the ceiling; edged at the bottom with soft curves, it resembles an undulating sea. Along two exterior walls, the Mart’s old-fashioned casement windows are equipped with translucent floor-to-ceiling pivoting glass panels which, like giant Levelor blinds, can be adjusted to modify the amount and angle of incoming natural light.

In addition to the arresting use of glass to orchestrate space, Krueck & Sexton’s innovations include the showroom’s lighting system; in the conference area and beyond, it employs colored lenses, bulbs, and gels, and can be programmed to change hues at various rates throughout the day. In another notable move, the architects constructed the space largely with recycled materials, a nod to the company’s modus operandi regarding its furniture, which incorporate recycled and “green” materials whenever possible.

Despite such bravura flourishes, the showroom is, ultimately, utilitarian–the perfect venue to present what Duffy describes as “our vision of what the future holds.”

Lisa Skolnik’s recent books include Retro Modern (Friedman Fairfax, 2000) and The Right Light (Rockport Publishers, 2000). Her feature on the Chicago restaurant Mod appeared in the August 2000 Interiors.

USER’S COMMENTS

SUSAN HALAS I Universal Studios Director of Design and Planning, Global Real Estate

As a furniture buyer, how effective do you think the showroom really is? I have 12 million square feet of space to manage in virtually every region of the world, so I’m always trying to find multifunctional office products that I can use globally. This showroom really lets you see how their furniture can do that.

How so? They stage many different functions there, and for each one the space seems to be so perfectly tailored to the event it’s as if they created it just for that particular presentation or party. But they didn’t, and in fact don’t really change the space at all–it takes on different characteristics by virtue of its lighting and the way the furniture is organized. Yet it always seems to remain a viable working environment.

And that’s your bottom line? Realistically, yes. Their product line is full of workplace solutions, and the showroom allows the company to reveal how their furniture can be used in almost any context.

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY, the main reading room at the New York Public Library has been the literary heart of a bookish city. A Beaux-Arts landmark designed by John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings that opened in 1911, the room exudes both civic grandeur–for a time it was the country’s largest uncolumned interior–and a warm, oaky intimacy. One feels impressed, enlightened, and uplifted here, but never over whelmed. It is also a truly public space, welcoming everyone from intellectuals to schoolchildren in a (usually) hushed harmony.

Over the years, however, the room had grown tarnished, and dusty. Nearly one quarter of the 23,000-Square foot space was obscured by an unsightly warren of microfilm readers. And the long, golden tables, with their vintage green-glass lights, had dulled with age and overuse. One of the greatest detractions from the room’s beauty came about when the magnificent windows on its north and south sides were blackened out as a precaution against World War II bombing; post-war, they remained gallingly dark to make microfilm reading easier.

Tourists now flock simply to stand and marvel at the restored reading room. Davis Brody Bond’s $15 million project has returned the space to a glory that few may remember, but none will soon forget. The focal point is the 55-foot-high ceiling, a celestial football field of plaster molded to resemble carved wood, highlighted with copper-and gold-leaf, and supported by neoclassical Caen limestone walls. Three trompe l’oeil rectangles reveal the pinkish clouds and soft blue light ofan appropriately literary rosy-fingered dawn. These atmospheric murals replace artist James Wall Finn’s originals, which were too ravaged by time to be restored or even accurately reproduced. The new ones, by Yohannes Aynalem of Evergreene Painting, are all “meant to give the impression of looking through the ceiling directly up at the sky,” says Lewis Davis, a founding partner of Davis Brody Bond.

A number of the room’s new features are, like the ceiling murals, creative interpretations rather than historic copies. For example, two new reference centers, large stations made from carved oak, and based on Carrere and Hastings’s designs, “blend so harmoniously,” says Davis, “visitors think that they’ve always been there.”

Led by Davis, the firm–feted for a previous renovation of New York University’s Center for the Humanities–faced not only the challenge of bringing back the space’s historical luster, but also that of ensuring its continued vitality with the addition of Information Age accouterments. Thus, the 22-foot tables, with their Carrere and Hastings chairs, were not only meticulously sanded and refinished, but retrofitted with electrical grommets and conduits for power and data.

The wonders of technology can hardly compete with the room’s classical elements, though. Its full floor area once again devoted to reading tables, the layers of grime removed, and lighting added to play up ceiling arches and illuminate bookshelves, the room is newly replete with light and air–a hothouse for learning, its lofty spaces open to all.

Tom Vanderbilt is a contributing editor to Interiors.

MICHAEL LEVINE I Freelance Writer and Editor

What’s your favorite part of this room? The ceiling.

How often do you come to the reading room? I come here on average three times a week.

How many hours do you spend? Anywhere from four to seven.

Do you find this room is a pretty encouraging place to work? I’ve been coming here so long, feel at home.

Is there anything you would change about this room? When you sit at those desks to write, some of the seats don’t get very good light. I was hoping they would improve that.

What’s the best thing about the restoration? The ceiling.

Twelve years ago, fire coursed through Higgins Hall, home of Pratt Institute’s architecture school. The flames destroyed the Victorian building’s central wing, and severely damaged the north section. New York-based architects Rogers Marvel were commissioned to quickly rehabilitate the damaged area, while the school raised money to replace the lost part. The firm opted to leave a patch of charred rubble between the wings, and to preserve other vestiges of fire damage throughout the renovated hails–that is, to remind students, who don’t yet know, and the faculty, who may have forgotten, that buildings are always vulnerable.

Robert Rogers, a principal in the firm, was on the Brooklyn-based school’s faculty at the time of the disaster. “The firemen hosed the building from eight trucks for six hours,” he recalls. The water damage exposed a kind of sedimentary archaeological site of 19th- and 20th-century construction methods: load-bearing masonry, iron columns, concrete-block in fill, rubble-filled concrete-and-masonry walls. (Built in 1868 as a boys’ academy, the edifice had been expanded four times before Pratt acquired it in 1965.) “We let the layers become the material quality of the building,” Rogers says. From that point, he adds, the design became a matter of “selective insertion of the things you need in a school, like studios and pin-up space.”

In most rooms, the new insertions frame just a few original details: a cast-iron capital here, a line of brick archways there. The firm cut new arches into existing brick walls in some classrooms, and lined brick halls with white canvas-wrapped Homasote display boards. But the memory of smoke still gets in your eyes: some openings are filled temporarily with panes of translucent Kalwall, and a few panes have been left clear for peeks at the rubble next door.

There’s also one space whose new configuration was entirely defined by fire: a two-story jury room, formed by a street-front gable that had been left dangerously unsupported after the roof burned off. To keep the gable from falling into the street, firemen hosed it heavily, pushing it into the building; its collapse destroyed several floors and created an accidental atrium. Another roof-level space that still reflects its fire trauma is a formerly unused attic, which has become a light-flooded undergraduate studio. Its new roof rests on steel trusses rather than the original wood, and the ceiling planes shift as they dodge around the beams: a contemporary, fractured environment has been born within the familiar restrictions of a 19th-century garret.

Victoria Milne is a New York-based desinger, curator, and writer. She is currently working on a book about natural forms in design.

DAMAN VAN HORNE I Third-year Undergraduate Architecture Student

What works best for you in the renovated North Wing? I admire the respect shown the irregularities of the existing structure. There are many areas in which bad spacing in brick, or sections that would be considered bad masonry, have been left uncorrected. Looking from the attic studio onto the remnants of the gutted courtyard has really affected my work in a positive way.

ALEX PORTER I Assistant Visting Professor

And what works best for you? The way the openings look onto that central space-some are translucent and some transparent. I’m interested in seeing how that will relate to the new building [design, awarded to Steven Holland Rogers Marvel]. Also, I like the warmth of the found materials versus the metal and

new materials, and some interesting stuff is going on with the moving partitions in the offices. They function in terms of a whole, dynamic space.