Las Urbanistas

Few shows force you to rethink an urban legend. That’s the challenge posed by “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” a sweeping, scholarly exhibition that breathes fresh air into one of the most tired, overworked and misunderstood subjects in the city’s history.

Long Island State Park Region Photo Archives/New York City Parks Photo Archives

Public pools like the Astoria Pool in Queens, here in 1936, were among the most popular projects initiated by Robert Moses.

Department of Parks and Recreation/NYC Municipal Archives

The opening of the Thomas Jefferson Pool in Manhattan in 1936.

Shown at three New York locations, the exhibition traces Moses’ remarkable career as parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960 and as a leader of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority from 1934 to 1968, when he oversaw a radical transformation of New York through the construction of bridges, expressways and public parks and vast slum clearance projects. It paints a nuanced portrait of a man who, in the public imagination at least, has become a caricature of the ruthless bureaucrat.

Most effectively, the show maps the extent to which Moses’ decisions were governed by the larger forces shaping the 20th-century city: a booming car culture, panic over middle-class flight to the suburbs, the rigid orthodoxies of late Modernism. In the process it demolishes the polarizing arguments that still define New York architecture and planning debates a quarter-century after the master builder’s death. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia University, the show should be required viewing for all government bureaucrats involved in urban policy — no, for anyone who loves New York.

For a generation of New Yorkers, Moses’ reputation was defined by his bitter battles in the 1960s, like the one with Jane Jacobs over a freeway proposal that would have condemned large sections of Lower Manhattan to the wrecking ball. It was cemented by Robert A. Caro’s “Power Broker,” the 1974 biography that famously portrayed Moses as a villainous figure who, through his control of federal slum clearance and highway money, was able to trample tens of thousands of lives, uprooting entire neighborhoods in a quest to impose his megalomaniacal vision: a city of dehumanizing superblocks strangled in ribbons of expressways.

The show’s intelligence is that it doesn’t shy away from Moses’ dark side. It includes one of his most shameful projects, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which displaced thousands of souls and pitilessly erased the thriving middle-class neighborhood of East Tremont.

And there are delicious discoveries, like a series of models at the Museum of the City of New York that the show’s organizers salvaged from a forgotten storage room beneath a footing of the Triborough Bridge, a few yards from the innocuous office building on Randalls Island where Moses plotted the city’s future. For example, a 22-foot-long wood scale model of the proposed Mid-Manhattan Expressway depicts a narrow section of the city, with the expressway marked by a dark gray line carving down its center.

That single line, cool yet menacing, testifies to Moses’ surgical detachment from the city he was operating on. It also links him to a modern urban tradition extending back through Le Corbusier’s vast theoretical schemes to the work of Baron Haussmann, the 19th-century planner who carved his grand boulevards through Paris’s medieval fabric with equal ruthlessness.

The human cost of Moses’ legacy — in displaced families, obliterated communities, lost historical memory — is impossible to measure. But using a wide array of architectural renderings, archival photographs and historical documents, the show also makes the point that, despite his reputation as an omnipotent planner, he lost plenty of battles along the way. Many of his most scorned proposals, from the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge from Red Hook to Battery Park in the 1930s to the expressways coursing across Midtown and Lower Manhattan, were never built. And many of Moses’ highway projects, especially those from the early decades, were major triumphs that integrated cars and nature.

The much beloved Riverside Park, for example, built by Moses in the 1930s over a strip of decrepit rail tracks, lumber yards and docks, neatly masks the view of cars streaming by below, in what remains a model of thoughtful urban planning.

For East River Park, a tree-shaded esplanade with recreational amenities completed in 1939, Moses reshaped the shoreline near the Williamsburg Bridge along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the East River. A pedestrian overpass completed two years later acts as a hinge, connecting it to an existing 19th-century park and culminating at a small, entrancing amphitheater (now in ruins, as a photograph in the show testifies), with the East River as its backdrop.

Projects like these, in which Moses sought to weave a densely populated metropolis into a broader regional network animated by the freedom of the open road, sprang from a heartfelt populist agenda.

Of course, Moses is far better known for more ignominious acts, like his plan, magnificently recounted in Mr. Caro’s book, to destroy a playground to expand the parking lot for the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park. When local mothers rebelled, Moses ordered the bulldozers in at night, creating a public scandal.

Yet Moses created much of the same park that is so beloved by parents today. When he was appointed city parks commissioner at the height of the Depression, Central Park was dotted with fetid Hoovervilles. Moses reseeded lawns, planted flowers, repaved walks, transformed the old Croton Reservoir into the Great Lawn and built a necklace of public playgrounds along the edges of the park, as well as ball fields and the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink.

Perhaps the most powerful architectural expressions of that mission were the 23 public swimming pools with bathhouses Moses built in a five-year period beginning in the mid-1930s. A graceful colonnaded arcade shelters the shops and restaurants at Orchard Beach; the vivid geometric forms and intricate tile and brick work of the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, celebrate the therapeutic value of communal exercise. For Moses, those projects were part of a broader strategy to reinforce middle-class neighborhoods and deter residents from fleeing to the suburbs.

But in many ways Moses was just a product of his times. In the 1930s, many American city planners had begun to recognize that suburbs posed a threat to the future of American cities. That panic peaked with the boom in postwar suburban development and passage of the federal highway act of 1956, which poured billions into the construction of a network of roads that spurred the exodus from cities and transformed the nation into a society dependent on cars.

Modernism, too, was changing. By the 1950s, the utopian visions generated in the early decades of the 20th century had calcified into a dogmatic formula: the functionalist city of high-rise residential blocks, distinct commercial and residential zones and a near total disregard for the neighborhood’s historical fabric. The impact can still be felt in places as far-flung as Detroit, Paris and Moscow.

This type of thinking was codified in the United States in a web of government and financial regulations. In the exhibition at Columbia University, a page of the manual for the Title I program, which provided the federal money for most of Moses’ housing projects, warns that “patching up hopelessly worn-out buildings” will only hinder large-scale slum clearance efforts.

Nor did Moses ever see good design — that is, innovative architectural form — as an instrument of public policy. Over the course of his career, he worked with many talented planners and architects, from Gilmore Clarke, the designer of Riverside Drive, to I. M. Pei. But it was left to private developers to choose the architects they worked with. And those architects had to navigate a maddening maze of federal and city rules.

When Mr. Pei was hired to design Kips Bay Plaza, completed in 1963, for instance, he struggled with Federal Housing Administration restrictions that not only limited a project’s cost per square foot but also gave preference to buildings with balconies. The deep-set concrete grid of his facade, creating the illusion of balconies, was an elegant ploy to circumvent these regulations.

If the formulas have changed since then, the preservationist arguments have only gained in intensity. By the time Moses died in 1981, the preservation movement was firmly established, and the wholesale destruction of urban neighborhoods was no longer a possibility. Yet historicist formulas like those embodied in recent projects like Battery Park City pose their own problems, injecting an incongruous note of suburban homogeneity. Middle-class housing developments like Stuyvesant Town, which Moses used as a model, are being sold to private developers who will drive out working families. And the city is virtually unable to build a park without corporate sponsorship these days.

The joy of this exhibition is that it recognizes that the issues facing cities today are more complex than choosing between a respect for the past and an embrace of the future. Moses, once a symbol of reckless change, is now part of our history too. We can see the beauty in some of his projects without denying the destructiveness of others.

Correction: February 10, 2007

A picture caption in Weekend on Feb. 2 with a review of exhibitions devoted to Robert Moses at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University referred incompletely to the Chatham Green housing project in Lower Manhattan. While Moses oversaw the development plan and chose the project’s sponsor, it was the sponsor — the Association for Middle Income Housing — that selected the architect and constructed the buildings, not Moses.

Federal court clerk Chris Sawyer gave up parking in his favorite lot near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles last summer when the monthly rate jumped to $100 from $55.

“I couldn’t afford it,” he said, “so I had to go back to Chinatown.” But that’s where his Jeep had been broken into, and his walk to the courthouse takes twice as long from there. Soon the price at his Chinatown lot climbed from about $60 to $80 a month.

Cheap, convenient parking — as Southern Californians have long known and expected it — is getting harder to find, particularly in high-density places such as Hollywood, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles.

Commuters who paid as little as $80 a month in downtown Los Angeles in the early 1990s are being hit up for as much as $300 for unreserved spaces. Prefer a prime slot with your name on it? Be prepared to write a check for more than $500 a month.

Basic economics — rising demand and declining supply — explain the parking price surge.

With five years of economic growth adding a stream of new buildings and residents, many lots and garages are filling up or disappearing. Housing developers in particular have converted downtown and Hollywood lots into residential buildings. With downtown land prices now surpassing $300 a square foot, it doesn’t make economic sense to buy land just to use it for parking, consultants say.

The rise in prices also underscores the region’s transformation from an extended suburbia into a more densely occupied urban center with the kind of parking challenges more common in major metropolises such as New York or Chicago.

Nowhere is the shift more evident than in downtown Los Angeles, where acres of asphalt are giving way to housing, stores and other attractions that people want to visit — by car, of course.

Downtown prices are rising not only on standard surface lots, but also in the garages of fancy high-rise office towers as the buildings finally begin to fill with workers after many years of low occupancy.

The expectation of cheap parking has been kicked to the curb in parts of Hollywood, especially during peak weekend hours for the district’s popular nightspots. With 55 clubs in the area, parking lots intended to serve them are frequently overbooked.

“It costs $5 during the day, then $25, $40 or $50 after dark,” said Tricia LaBelle, owner of Boardner’s, a Cherokee Avenue watering hole since 1942. The scale often slides, she says, because some lot operators charge what they find the market will bear hour by hour.

Sometimes the price even hits $100 to secure prompt valet service, club operator Elizabeth Peterson said, “but $60 is usually about the most on a weekend.”

There aren’t nearly enough high rollers to go around, though, and business owners worry that high parking costs will drive away the average clubbers who have been flocking to Hollywood.

“We have seen a dip in business at many clubs because people can’t get in here,” LaBelle said. “After years of dramatic increases, business is leveling off.”

Hollywood nightclub owner and restaurateur David Gajda called the high parking prices “an absolute mess.”

“People are going to be so frustrated they are not going to come,” he said.

Eagle Rock residents Jacob Calvache and Angie Garcia got off comparatively easy late last Friday night, paying $20 to park next to the club Avalon at Hollywood and Vine.

“Everybody needs to make a profit, I guess,” Calvache said sarcastically. “It’s a little outrageous, but it’s not unexpected.”

Such price pressures could stunt Southern Californians’ storied love affair with their cars, some experts suggest, though most evidence of changes in behavior is anecdotal. Public transportation advocates say that rising costs of driving will push motorists into mass transit, especially if employers stop subsidizing their workers’ parking habits.

“People are shifting,” said Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, a nonprofit organization based in Sylmar. “They don’t like to pay for parking. If transit can replace that need, people will choose it.”

Thousands of Los Angeles County commuters already ditch their cars at Metro Rail stations every weekday so they can hop a train to work. Although general parking is free, some stops are so crowded that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority offers reserved parking for a price.

Higher prices are translating into fatter profits for parking lot owners. Each stall on the average downtown lot grosses about $10,000 a year, said industry expert Bill Francis of Walker Parking Consultants. So a lot with 100 parking spots would bring in $1 million with very little operating costs.

“Now is a good time to be a parking operator,” Francis said.

Even with the increases, downtown Los Angeles parking prices are low compared with other downtowns, parking lot magnate Joe Lumer said. His company, L&R Investments, controls about 100 lots and garages downtown, with more than 10,000 spaces.

“In cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York and Seattle it can cost as much as $40 or $50 to park,” Lumer said. “The top [daytime] rate on a surface lot downtown is $10 or $12. There is no lack of parking.”

Left to market forces, though, parking prices will continue to rise, said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who represents much of downtown.

“There won’t be a lot of space left in the next five to seven years,” Perry said. “I didn’t expect this to happen so quickly.”

The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency is conducting a study that will consider abandoning a requirement, established in 1990, limiting how much parking could be included in new downtown office buildings. The intent was to compel office workers to park in structures on the edge of downtown and ride shuttle buses in. But most of them balked and signed up for cheap parking in nearby surface lots.

Other options include building the kind of massive public garages that have eased the parking burdens in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Pasadena.

Santa Monica’s success at creating a vibrant downtown, however, has taxed its parking resources and challenged its commitment to environment-friendly planning policies.

With its public parking structures filling up, the city has made some of its garages taller and plans to add 1,700 more spaces over the next decade, said Ellen Gelbard, deputy director of planning and community development.

In downtown Los Angeles, parking is at such a premium in the historic core that the city should enact a moratorium on further developments that take away existing lots, said Michael Delijani, whose company owns three classic but rarely used theaters on Broadway, including the Los Angeles Theater completed in 1931.

“It might even be too late already,” Delijani said, to secure enough parking sites to revive the Broadway theater district that was once the West Coast equivalent of New York’s Great White Way. Twelve major historic theaters survive, but most have no parking.

Parking lot owners are ratcheting up their fees in the area around Staples Center as that district becomes more desirable.

Maguire Properties Inc. has more than doubled monthly rates, to as much as $130, at its 2,260-space garage at Grand Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The facility was once nearly empty, its gaping floors easily visible from the San Bernardino Freeway, making it one of the city’s most notorious white elephants.

But the addition of Staples Center and new surrounding residences have made the garage desirable.

“We would have liked to have seen it happen a little sooner,” Maguire Senior Vice President Bill Flaherty said, “but now it’s generating a tremendous amount of interest.”

Student Michelle Carter walks for blocks around the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising looking for the cheapest parking, which has risen from $3 to $5 a day in the two years she has been studying product development at the campus near Staples Center.

“The closer to school it is, the more expensive it is,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

Elizabeth Berger, an office worker at the nearby Petroleum Building, said her nonprofit employer has moved staff parking four times in the last five years because prices keep going up. Now she has about a 10-minute hike through a neighborhood that still feels dicey sometimes.

Many lots near Staples have flexible pricing that rises with demand created by events at the sports venue and the Los Angeles Convention Center. Before a recent evening Tool concert, for example, the price at one Flower Street lot climbed from $5 in the daytime to $15 before the show.

From left, Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando.

Planned for a 670-acre cultural district in Abu Dhabi: Above, from left, a Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry, a classical museum by Jean Nouvel, a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando. Also envisioned are a national museum and 19 arts pavilions bordering a canal.

FIFTY years ago this modest slice of the Persian Gulf coast was a sleepy settlement of palm-front huts and Bedouin encampments, its few thousand inhabitants mostly subsisting on fishing and the pearl-diving trade. Oil changed all that of course, and since the 1960s Abu Dhabi has morphed into a modern capital of hotels and high rises, fulfilling the economic vision of the United Arab Emirates’ ambitious former leader, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan.

Now the city is on the verge of another audacious leap. Over the next decade or so it aims to become one of the great cultural centers of the Middle East: the heir, in its way, to cosmopolitan cities of old like Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad.

This latter-day Xanadu, as envisioned in a glittering multimillion-dollar exhibition in the lobby of the opulent Emirates Palace Hotel here, would boast four museums, a performing arts center and 19 art pavilions designed by celebrated architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel. The development could include leading cultural lights of the West, from the Guggenheim to the Louvre to Yale University.

Just one component of a $27 billion residential, office and hotel development planned for Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness), the 670-acre cultural district is still in the nascent stages. Most of the major cultural institutions have yet to sign on officially, and the Guggenheim, for one, is well known for chasing unrealized dreams.

Some will dismiss this kingdom of culture as a mere tourist development in which art, history and regional identity are reduced to marketing commodities. But those who view it as an exercise in global branding or as a feel-good story about an Arab country willing to embrace the values of Western modernity are missing the point.

With once-proud cities like Beirut and Baghdad ripped apart by political conflict bordering on civil war, Abu Dhabi offers the hope of a major realignment, a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East.

It’s easy to be skeptical. But judging by the designs released so far, the buildings promise to be more than aesthetic experiments, outlining a vision of cross-cultural pollination.

For Abu Dhabi’s tourist and development authority, mapping out a mix of marinas and beachfront resorts seemed straightforward enough. But when it came to the cultural master plan, the agency decided to call in Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, known for his campaign to open a dozen Guggenheim branches in places like Singapore, St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro (few of which have been built).

He began by pulling together a list of famous architectural talents. For the Guggenheim Mr. Gehry was enlisted to replicate his success in Bilbao, Spain. Mr. Nouvel was offered a “classical” museum that could house visiting exhibitions from the Louvre, Ms. Hadid a performing arts center and Tadao Ando a maritime museum. (Each building is expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Mr. Krens worked with Skidmore Owings & Merrill to revamp the original master plan, adding a canal flanked by a string of 19 pavilions that could be used to present art and architecture biennials — a not-so-subtle knockoff of the highly successful Venice Biennale. Meanwhile the development authority began a series of conversations with Yale University about creating an arts institute — encompassing art, architecture, music and drama — directly across the performing arts center. Next on the agenda is a competition to design a national museum.

In some ways this array suggests the market’s insatiable appetite for novelty rather than a cohesive vision. In the early stages the various cultural institutions will rely mostly on art loans from foreign museums and performances by touring companies. For the time being Abu Dhabi has no opera company or orchestra that would use the performing arts center as a permanent home.

And the exhibition at the Emirates Palace Hotel comes across as an extravagant marketing pitch to the country’s rulers, who have yet to give the project final approval. A chunk is devoted to the Guggenheim Bilbao, a blunt reminder of how architecture has been used as a marketing gambit. A wall text unabashedly projects figures on the income the cultural hub could generate through new tourism.

But in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Krens has found a client whose interest runs deeper than collecting tourist dollars. Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon al-Nahyan, chief of the tourist and development authority, says the emirate’s desire is to create a contemporary cultural locus with little precedent in the region.

“What is happening is unfortunate in places like Beirut,” Sheik Sultan said. “We want it to come back to its old days.” Ultimately, he added, the emirate hopes that Abu Dhabi’s arts district will become a cultural hub of the Middle East and a starting point for cultural exchange.

Given the difficulties Muslims have encountered traveling to and doing business in the United States and Europe since 9/11, the project can also be read as an attempt to recreate the experience of the West in a secure zone for Arabs, a kind of mini-Switzerland of the Middle East.

Of the architects enlisted so far Mr. Nouvel in particular has spent his career exploring the intersection between the intricacies of local cultures and Western modernism. For his 1987 Institute of the Arab World in Paris, he designed a gridlike facade of mechanical oculi that open and close like camera lenses, evoking an Arab mashrabiya, or latticework window. His anarchic Musée du Quai Branly, which opened in Paris last summer, evokes a violent collision of modern and tribal forms.

For Abu Dhabi, Mr. Nouvel conceived of his classical museum as a watery warren of buildings, plazas, alleyways and canals evoking a small city floating on the sea. A shallow lacelike steel dome nearly 600 feet in diameter hovers over the complex, shielding it from the heat and allowing a delicate pattern of light to filter down to the open-air courts.

The dome recalls traditional mosques and perhaps the enormous geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller once proposed erecting over Lower Manhattan, a delicate container meant for the rich cultural mix throbbing underneath. It’s as if Mr. Nouvel has fashioned a contemporary Venice, a remarkable expression of the creative magic that can arise when East and West collide.

Although the development company has approached several art institutions about lending artworks to the museum, most notably the Louvre in Paris, its mission is still relatively vague. To accommodate the need for flexibility, the complex is conceived as a series of interconnected galleries whose sequence can be easily reconfigured depending on the scale and nature of an exhibition. Mr. Nouvel also envisions the art spilling out onto the alleyways and courtyards, from sculpture to mosaics.

Mr. Gehry’s Guggenheim, planned for a choice site at the tip of the island, is also conceived as a series of galleries loosely arranged around open-air courtyards, a bit like a souk. But the similarity between the two museums ends there. Passing through a glass atrium, visitors will enter a court enclosed by an enormous cone-shape wind tower. A series of conventional galleries are stacked loosely around the court. Two big warehouse-like galleries spill outward from there, interspersed by several cone-shape exhibition spaces that are tipped on their sides and open to the surrounding landscape.

The mix of conventional and oddly shaped galleries harks back to the design for the Guggenheim Bilbao. But like all of Mr. Gehry’s best work, the design draws inspiration from its immediate context. The cone-shape galleries, which he says are derived from traditional Islamic wind towers, will draw air up through the interiors, cooling them in the summer heat. Their curved forms, which might be fashioned from alabaster or a high-tech fabric, vaguely evoke traditional Bedouin tents.

Mr. Nouvel and Mr. Gehry have ingeniously harnessed local architectural traditions without stooping to superficial interpretations of historical styles. Intrinsically their designs acknowledge that the flow of culture between East and West has not always been one-sided. If they convey nostalgia, it is for a belief in the future.

Ms. Hadid’s design for the performing arts center springs from the complex nature of the site rather than an exploration of cultural memory. Her building will punctuate the district’s cultural main axis, which runs from the site of the future national museum to the waterfront, and offers a sweeping view of Abu Dhabi’s existing skyline.

Looming aggressively over the water’s edge, the structure’s taut glistening form calls to mind a gigantic snake, its tail tapering off toward the national museum. Ms. Hadid describes the complex as a system of entwined branches with four concert halls trapped inside them like luscious fruit.

The belly of the main hall rises into the air, with a waterfront promenade passing directly underneath. At the intersection of the promenade and the main axis, a large public court is crowned by a towering atrium, a potent contrast with the cocoonlike halls.

Of the four designs presented so far, Mr. Ando’s design for the maritime museum seems the feeblest. A stylized stone block that stands in the middle of an enormous reflecting pool, its arching form and cavernous interiors look like an apparition from the ’70s. And the proposals for the biennial pavilions, designed by an array of younger talents over the past month, are a mixed bag ranging from inspired to clumsy.

Yet overall it is heartening to see Western architects engaged in seeking a balance between the brute force of global culture — its ruthless effacement of differences, its Darwinian indifference to the have-nots — and the fragility of local traditions.

A half-century ago the modern forms exported by American and European architects were mostly uniform expressions of the triumph of Western modernity. Today most serious practitioners are willing to acknowledge that cultures are forever evolving, and subject to new interpretation.

The question is whether the creative momentum of the individual designs can be maintained in the cultural district over all. Though still in the early stages, the master plan is a disappointment. It represents nothing so much as an outmoded 19th-century planning formula, — an axial Beaux-Arts scheme with hotels, marinas and cultural monuments sprinkled along the edges. The meandering canal, which was obviously added as an afterthought, is a weak attempt to soften the design’s rigid geometries.

But for Abu Dhabi’s cultural planners the ultimate challenge lies in taking a hard look at the global role of the arts. The world has changed radically since the completion of the Guggenheim Bilbao 10 years ago. The old cosmopolitan models — the avant-garde Modernism of mid-century Beirut, the intermingling of Muslims, Jews and Christians in Baghdad or Basra in Iraq — are unraveling. Once considered great tapestries of human experience, those cities are either riven by internal conflict or, like their Western counterparts, risk being transformed into sanitized theme parks.

More and more, large-scale cultural developments are being used to promote that transformation. At their most cynical they can conjure architecture’s function as a tool of Western propaganda during the cold war, the trade shows and expos packed with symbols of suburban affluence.

This issue is especially resonant in the Middle East, where the basic choice is sometimes presented as embracing a sterile brand of modernity or slipping back into the Middle Ages.

In this context the two most promising elements of the Abu Dhabi plan may be the least developed ones — the national museum and the arts institute — since both have the potential to engage a new generation of Arabs in a complex cultural conversation.

As for the Guggenheim, the Louvre and other Western institutions involved in the project, they need to show they are serious about a deeper kind of cultural commitment. For a start they could set up permanent curatorial staffs here to plan ambitious programming rather than lending minor Renaissance masters or second-tier Rauchenbergs and Turrells. Ideally those museum positions will one day be filled by trained Arab graduates.

Otherwise we are simply pushing around pretty cultural commodities — and reinforcing the cultural rifts we claim to be dismantling.