Monday, February 12, 2007

Grand Canyon Skywalk opens deep divide

Arizona’s Hualapai Tribe hopes to draw more visitors with a controversial structure that will jut over the crevasse.
By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer; February 11, 2007

Grand Canyon West's Skywalk A walk into controversy

GRAND CANYON WEST, ARIZ. — Perched over the Grand Canyon close to a mile above the Colorado River, a massive, multimillion-dollar glass walkway will soon open for business as the centerpiece of a struggling Indian tribe’s plan to lure tourists to its remote reservation.

An engineering marvel or a colossal eyesore, depending on who is describing it, the horseshoe-shaped glass walkway will jut out 70 feet beyond the canyon’s edge on the Hualapai Indian Reservation just west of Grand Canyon Village. Buttressed by 1 million pounds of steel and supporting 90 tons of tempered glass, the see-through deck will give visitors a breathtaking view of the canyon.


When the cantilevered structure opens to the public next month, it will be the most conspicuous commercial edifice in the canyon. And, if the tribe’s plans come to fruition, the Skywalk will be the catalyst for a 9,000-acre development, known as Grand Canyon West, that will open up a long-inaccessible 100-mile stretch of countryside along the canyon’s South Rim. The cost of the Skywalk alone will exceed $40 million, tribal officials say.

“Skywalk is the ‘wow’ that will draw people,” said Steve Beattie, the chief financial officer for Grand Canyon Resort Corp., the tribe’s business arm. Construction on an attached 6,000-square-foot visitors center and restaurant is to begin after the walkway opens. The Skywalk will charge an admission fee of $25, Beattie said, adding that some of the financing will come from a private-sector partner.

Tribal officials say the development, which may eventually include hotels, restaurants and a golf course, is the best way to address the social ills of a small reservation, where the 2,000 residents struggle with a 50% unemployment rate and widespread alcoholism and poverty.

But off the reservation, many people regard the development and especially the Skywalk as tantamount to defacing a national treasure.

“It’s the equivalent of an upscale carnival ride,” said Robert Arnberger, a former superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park who was born near the canyon’s South Rim. “Why would they desecrate this place with this?”

“I’ve never been able to resolve the apparent conflict between the tribe’s oft-stated claim that there is no better caregiver and steward of the Grand Canyon than the tribe, and their approach to the land — which is based on heavy use and economics,” he said.

“They say the Grand Canyon is theirs to do with however they please. Under law, it’s hard to argue that proposition. But obviously the lure of dollars for the tribal treasury is greater than the obligation to manage the Grand Canyon for its cultural and historic values.”

Other critics say the Skywalk and related development will only add to the commercialization that has detracted from the experience of nature in the national park.

“What the Grand Canyon needs most is a place for quiet contemplation and recreation,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental group. “The Skywalk is part of a process that is turning the canyon into a tacky commercial playground.”

Not so, say tribal leaders.

“You look at the park side, they have 4.5 million people a year — it’s Disneyland in itself,” said Sheri YellowHawk, a former member of the Hualapai tribal council and chief executive of the tribe’s business entity. “They have too many cars and can’t resolve their transportation issues. We’re looking at their problems and trying to resolve them up front. We’ve gone through 2 1/2 years of going back and forth with cultural assessment and biological assessments and community input. We have to find a means to self-sustain ourselves. The money is dwindling.”

The Hualapai have worked for years to attract more tourists to their 1-million-acre reservation. About 200,000 people visit the reservation each year. The tribe levies a charge for weddings on the canyon rim and other events, including a motorcycle stunt ride in which daredevil Robbie Knievel jumped a side canyon. But after a disappointing foray into casino gambling, the tribe decided three years ago to launch a one-of-a-kind development at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The tribe expects the Skywalk to boost tourism at a more modest development already in place: a smattering of sites 120 miles east of Las Vegas offering experiences that can’t be found at the park, including an Old West Main Street and cowboy show, an Indian village, horseback riding, wagon rides and Humvee tours.

In addition, the Hualapai operate airplane and helicopter tours that fly visitors into the canyon on low-level routes, which are forbidden at the national park. After landing beside the river, visitors can embark on guided pontoon boat and raft rides — day tours not offered in the park. The tribe’s master plan calls for the construction of a cable car to ferry visitors from the canyon rim to the river.

There, the tribe is also seeking to expand tourism. The Grand Canyon National Park’s Colorado River management plan, finalized in December, allows the tribe to take 600 passengers on motorized pontoon boats each day, far fewer than the 1,800 daily allotment the Hualapai requested.

Beattie of Grand Canyon Resort Corp. said the boating restrictions would prevent the tribe from expanding river operations, now the tribe’s most popular tourist attraction. Although it flows through the reservation, the river is under federal control.

Some members of the tribe are uncomfortable with the development. Joe Powskey, a Hualapai guide who takes tourists through a newly built Indian village adjacent to the Skywalk construction site, said that although growth was necessary to give the tribe an economic base, tribal leaders needed to be careful not to overdo it.

“Our priority is not to overdevelop,” Powskey said. “We want to kind of keep it pristine here.”

Powskey said he was aggrieved to see visitors step down from buses and toss cigarette butts around the rim. “We ask people not to smoke. They do. We tell them not to throw cigarettes around; the bones of our ancestors are buried here.”

Others in the tribe have been critical of what they say is the development’s lack of sustainability, pointing out that water used here is trucked in over miles of unpaved, rutted roads, and that there is no sewer, trash, telephone or electrical service. The airport, which is expanding, operates on diesel generators. The park, in contrast, has a busy complex of hotels, shops and restaurants, most clustered on the South Rim of the Canyon, several miles upstream from the reservation. The park does not draw water from the river, but from an aging pipeline.

Tribal officials admit it will be difficult to operate a full-service resort without upgrading infrastructure and finding a local source of water. Hualapai officials said last week that they were considering taking water from the Colorado River.

Pumping water up nearly a vertical mile from the river to the rim of the canyon could be fraught with financial and legal challenges. Joseph Feller, who teaches water law at Arizona State University, says no tribe has ever taken water from the Colorado without first negotiating with the federal government.

The tribe’s YellowHawk said: “We’re looking at pumping water out of the river; that may be our best bet.” She added that the tribe was attempting to negotiate with the Department of the Interior. Attorneys with the department solicitor’s office confirmed that the tribe had made initial overtures regarding water rights on the Colorado.

Feller said there was no doubt the Hualapai had long-standing rights to water from the Colorado, but how much they may take has not been determined.

“Usually, you end up with a legal settlement, in which the tribe accepts less water than it wants in return for federal financial assistance to put the rights to use,” he said.

But once the infrastructure issues are resolved, “there’s no end to investors who want to be a part of this,” Beattie said. “Who doesn’t want to be part of the Grand Canyon?”

julie.cart@latimes.com
Posted by M at 05:24:46 | Permalink | No Comments »

Where Floor Plans Are Sought After, and Why

By JOYCE COHEN
Published: February 11, 2007

THERE are things New York apartments typically lack — a yard, a parking place, a washer-dryer. But there is one thing they do possess: floor plans, most often derived from buildings’ original marketing materials.

Floor plans are important when an apartment goes on the market and a listing goes on the Web, real estate agents say, because buyers in New York depend so heavily on them.

 

”If I don’t have it on the Internet right away, people want me to fax over a floor plan,” said Lauren Cangiano, an agent at Halstead Property Company in Manhattan. She added that ”there are things that will make you not visit an apartment if it doesn’t show on the floor plan.”

”People want split bedrooms; they don’t want bedrooms next to each other,” Ms. Cangiano said. ”Or they want a kitchen with a window so they can sneak a cigarette.”

A floor plan shows the entire unit, not just part of it. In other words, floor plans reveal what photographs often do not: the proportions of rooms, the number of rooms and the traffic flows among them. A buyer can instantly see, for instance, if the kitchen is conveniently situated near the dining room, whether bedrooms open directly onto the living room or whether a trip to the bathroom will involve a walk through a bedroom.

”When you look at a floor plan, it is the apartment standing there naked,” said Gerald Makowski, director of marketing at Halstead Property.

Floor plans are starting to move into three dimensions, a real help for those who have trouble visualizing physical space. Some developers show elevation plans, where you can pick a floor from the side view of a building and then highlight a particular unit. More customization is likely as technology improves.

Outside New York, however, floor plans are rarely used as marketing tools by brokers who are reselling houses, although they are more likely to be used by builders of housing developments, who include floor plans as one of the many tools on their Web sites.

The Toll Brothers Web site, for example, includes an elaborate ”design your own home” feature allowing people, within limits, to experiment with the floor plan. ”They get to design something with the builder and make it their own, and not settle for a resale situation where someone else has made those decisions,” said Kira McCarron, chief marketing officer at Toll Brothers.

Those who are downsizing scrutinize the floor plan most thoroughly, said Kara Opanowicz, a vice president of architecture for K. Hovnanian Homes. ”We have a lot of move-down buyers — empty-nesters taking their furniture with them,” who want to be sure everything will fit, she said. ”They are concerned with the exactness of what they are getting.”

Brent Gleeson, the president of NewCondosOnline.com, which markets new condominiums worldwide, estimated that 90 percent of the properties that he was selling featured a floor plan online. In fact, the most requested items from prospective buyers using the site are prices and floor plans.

These plans help buyers determine ”how much space they want and need,” Mr. Gleeson said — something they are not able to do with an on-site visit. ”Builders do preconstruction and presale advertising, so they are marketing properties that have not yet been built.”

Some individual agents are beginning to create floor plans to distinguish themselves from the competition. Christine Pardo, an agent at Kroll Realty in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., often creates her own floor plans for clients, similar to those she created when she was a kitchen designer. It is timeconsuming: She spends an hour measuring and another hour working with a computer program.

People are always impressed by the result, she said. Currently, with so much inventory in Florida, ”it would be easy to show a buyer between 6 and 25 homes a weekend,” she said. ”After 25 homes, which are you going to remember? The ones you are holding paperwork on.”

Sellers who want to create their own floor plans or experiment with designs can try user-friendly programs like those from smartdraw.com and plan3d.com.

There are endless debates about what floor plans should feature, and there is no standardization, so users should be aware of what the plans show and what they do not.

Many include a key plan, showing the unit’s location on the floor of a building. But what about the swing of the doors? A thick line to indicate a load-bearing wall? The depth of a fireplace mantel? Some include interesting extras, like a label for a skylight.

But plenty of basic structural information can be missing: the height of the windows, the width of hallways, the placement of electrical outlets, the apartment’s overall condition. Some lack an arrow pointing north.

Older plans usually show crosshatching in kitchen and bathrooms, to distinguish wet and dry areas. Now, the convention is to use crosshatching only in bathrooms, said Doug Barton, who creates floor plans for several New York real estate brokerage firms.

”I don’t do it in kitchens,” he said, ”because you have other things going on there. People want to know how many bathrooms there are, but usually there is one kitchen.”

In addition, dimensions are often printed on floor plans, but there is no guarantee that they are accurate. ”You must always challenge the dimensions,” Mr. Barton said. ”I have seen two particular situations that were wrong. There was a squarish bedroom labeled 10 feet by 15 feet and a rectangular bedroom labeled 14 feet by 14 feet. So use your brain.”

Stephen Joseph, vice president for store design of Bergdorf Goodman, loved the floor plan of a West End Avenue one-bedroom coop, but was ambivalent when he finally saw the apartment. Almost every window faced a brick wall — a deal breaker that hadn’t appeared on the floor plan. Only the living room had a view of the street, and not a nice one.

”I went back time after time,” he said. ”I tortured myself.”

Mr. Joseph ended up withdrawing his offer and buying a duplex with a floor plan that revealed lots of open space. This one had a lovely view of Broadway. What counts for him, Mr. Joseph said, are the three L’s: layout, light and location.

”I have seen so many apartments that didn’t have any views, that were all interior,” he said. Had this information been on the floor plan, ”I never would have gone to see them.”

To help people read floor plans, Brooklyn Bridge Realty in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has started using three-dimensional ones prepared by the Gotham Photo Company. Clients love it, and ”it is so much easier to read than a bare floor plan,” especially when it comes to staircases, said Jean Austin, the owner.

That third dimension is likely to be increasingly important. ”Real estate lends itself really well to 3-D,” said Vince Collura, director of business development for Gotham Photo.

He predicts that people will be able to zoom into the floor plan, so that ”instead of a bird’s-eye view, you’re at a standing level,” he said, and to customize the plan by changing the color of the walls and floors.

Technology has made people increasingly design-conscious, helping them realize that layout may be as important as size, said Leonard Steinberg, a vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman in New York.

”The big shift happened when people realized how much space a regular TV used rather than a plasma TV,” he said. ”The clunky old TV took up four square feet. Hello! That is $4,000 in New York!”

WhichWay Is Up? Here’s Some Help

IF you have trouble understanding or making use of floor plans, here are some suggestions: Compare a room with one that is familiar. ”My old bedroom was 12 by 18,” said Alison Rogers, an agent at DG Neary Realty. ”I can’t tell how big a room is, but I can tell if it is bigger or smaller than my bedroom.”

Play designer: Enlarge the floor plan and make cutouts of your furniture to scale, so you can rearrange them on the plan and see how everything fits.

Carry a tape measure and verify measurements. ”Sometimes those measurements are really wrong,” said Leonard Steinberg of Prudential Douglas Elliman.

Look up. If you are distracted by the furniture and cannot see the edges of a room, looking at the ceiling will give you the footprint, with some exceptions, like a kitchen island or peninsula, said Bradford Trebach of Trebach Realty in the Bronx. JOYCE COHEN

Posted by M at 05:07:52 | Permalink | No Comments »

How Green Was My Wedding

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Published: February 11, 2007

KATE Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this:

Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours.

Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.

Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.

“It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.”

Call Ms. Harrison the anti-Bridezilla, whose wedding is all about the planet, rather than “all about me.” People in the wedding business say the eco-friendly or “green” wedding has arrived, its appeal having expanded to spur a mini-industry of stores and Web sites offering couples biodegradable plates made of sugar cane fiber and flowers grown according to sustainable farming practices.

The quality and choice of products has so steadily improved that the green concept is spreading to other kinds of parties, allowing hosts to embrace the earth without sacrificing style, party planners and others say.

“People are making purchasing decisions based on environmental concerns,” said Gerald Prolman, the founder of OrganicBouquet.com, an online organic florist. Mr. Prolman, who said his Web site has doubled its sales yearly since it began in 2001, added a wholesale business last August to meet growing demand.

“Whether it’s food or cotton or flowers,” Mr. Prolman said, “people are asking questions: How are farmworkers treated? Who produced the product? How is the environment affected in that process?”

Eric Fenster, an owner of Back to Earth , an organic catering company in Berkeley, said that when he started his business in 2001, his clients consisted almost exclusively of social justice and environmental nonprofit groups. But that market has expanded to make weddings a third of his business.

And few events offer as many opportunities to say “I care” than a wedding, whose average cost is $25,000 to $30,000. Bridal magazines, too, have recognized the trend, and a new online site, Portovert.com, made its appearance last month, catering to “eco-savvy brides and grooms.”

MILLIE MARTINI BRATTEN, the editor in chief of Brides magazine, said that over the last five years the interest in green weddings has blossomed from a desire to incorporate a few green elements, like a vegan menu, to making sure the entire celebration won’t contribute to the depletion of natural resources. This may include finding halls that recycle, hiring caterers who use locally grown ingredients, decorating with potted plants that can be transplanted and using soy-based candles, rather than those of petroleum-based wax.

“If anything, it makes the wedding even more meaningful,” said Ms. Martini Bratten, whose magazine’s February-March issue features a planning guide for a green wedding.

Today, some in the eco-business note, even the honeymoon can be green without roughing it. “You used to have to go camping,” said Ted Ning, the executive director of the Lohas Journal, a resource guide for businesses that serve the environmentally conscious market. “Now you have these amazing luxurious spas in Africa or Fiji. You can look at different animals while getting a massage in a tree.”

But can weddings really make a dent in global warming, particularly if the couple then set out on an emission-spewing trans-Atlantic flight for the honeymoon?

Janet Larsen, the director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research group in Washington, said that every little bit helps. “All the actions add up,” she said. “Anything individuals can do to reduce their overall environmental footprint can make a difference.” Joshua Houdek, 32, and Kristi Papenfuss, 35, are planning a “zero waste” wedding for 250 guests in August. It will take place on a farm and include compostable plates and utensils, organic and fair trade-certified food, locally brewed beer and organic wine and wedding rings that are “100 percent reclaimed, recycled, ecologically responsible gold,” said Mr. Houdek, who works as a Sierra Club organizer in Minneapolis.

In lieu of traditional gifts, Mr. Houdek and Ms. Papenfuss, an elementary school teacher, plan to ask guests to sign up for renewable energy and reforestation projects to counteract their energy consumption or to donate to the Sierra Club or other environmental groups.

The couple doesn’t think it’s too much to ask. “We’re not forcing them,” Mr. Houdek stressed, though Ms. Papenfuss said that some people have been surprised at the elements that are making an appearance at their wedding.

“We’ve had a few people say ‘What?’ when we talk about biodegradable forks that are potato-based,” she said. ‘What do you mean forks made out of potato?’ “

For her wedding, Ms. Harrison, who is working on a law degree and a master’s in environmental management, and her fiancé, Barry Muchnick, 33, also a graduate student at Yale, plan to treat guests to a rehearsal barbecue dinner at an organic farm in Garrison, N.Y. The next day’s ceremony is to take place at Castle Rock, a state-owned 19th-century castle in a scenic trail area, followed by the reception at a golf club, whose restaurant serves organic food.

The couple are looking for shuttle buses that run on biodiesel fuel to move guests between sites, and Ms. Harrison is making pottery for her guests to take home as party favors. It all sounds like more work and expense than the traditional wedding. While Mr. Ning of Lohas Journal noted that going organic often means paying up to 20 percent more because many products come from small farms that receive no government subsidies, some brides noted that a wedding at a farm is more economical than at a hotel or hall.

“It doesn’t have to be any more or any less expensive,” Ms. Papenfuss said.

Some couples make tradeoffs so they can afford to go green. Sarah Minick, 29, an environmental planner in the Bay Area, and Siddhartha Mitra, 27, a doctoral student at the University of California at San Francisco, kept their wedding last July on the small side, about 75 guests, so they could offer an organic menu, which they said cost about 10 percent more than traditional food. The couple had their ceremony and reception in a natural setting that required few decorations, the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. They went less green on the favors, though: they gave non-native tropical plants because they thought them more beautiful than locally grown varieties and felt their guests would enjoy them more, Mr. Mitra said.

“We’re really happy with how it turned out,” the bridegroom said. “It reflected us.”

The environmentally conscious party concept is spreading. Marriott International will soon announce deals with organicbouquet.com and other vendors to make organic flowers available to customers for events, starting in the spring, said Laurie Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the hotel chain. Ms. Goldstein, who said the demand was driven by corporate meeting planners seeking to be more socially responsible, called organic flowers “the first step” to offering all-green events, including organic food and organic cotton tablecloths.

Even Hollywood is jumping on the bandwagon. For the Golden Globes last month, E! Entertainment partnered with the Environmental Media Association as hosts to a Golden Green after-party, including napkins printed with energy-saving tips. The organizers also committed themselves to planting a tree for each of the 800-plus guests.

For private parties, as for weddings, Ms. Martini Bratten advises couples that no matter how well intentioned, they should not appear to be coercing guests into contributing to a cause. Asking them to buy a certain gift or donate to a specific group is fine as long as that is conveyed as just one choice, she said. “It shouldn’t be a requirement,” she said. “Imposing your wishes on someone else is crossing the line.”

What about the host who wants to send guests home with energy-efficient light bulbs?

Many couples said that more often than not their friends and families want to make a difference, too. “I have a couple of relatives who think some of it is unnecessary, but they appreciate the mind-set behind it,” Ms. Harrison said. “It’s a huge opportunity for people to make choices that can affect change. It’s one of the biggest contributions you can make as a young adult.”

Posted by M at 03:43:51 | Permalink | No Comments »

Where the Winery Itself Is a Little Tipsy

By CHRIS COLIN

Published: February 11, 2007

. © KunstHausWien; The Quixote Winery in California’s Napa Valley. Designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, it has been producing wine since 1999 but is opening to the public for the first time this weekend. Revolutionary Aesthetic

HISTORICALLY American fans of the wildly eccentric artist and designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser have had to board a plane to get their fix. But for those who do make it to his colorful, biomorphic public housing masterpiece in his native Vienna, or to his sparkling, off-kilter incineration plant in Osaka, Japan, his revolutionary aesthetic tends not to disappoint. Trees are considered tenants and grow out of their own windows. Flat floors are forbidden; an uneven walking surface is “a melody to the feet.” Residents can lean out of their windows and paint anything within arm’s reach. The roof? A minor wilderness.

Starting this weekend Americans can get a taste of that aesthetic when the Quixote Winery in Napa Valley, the only Hundertwasser building in the country, finally opens to the public. Another place to swirl a glass in Northern California would scarcely be news, but this is not just another place. Tucked up in the golden hills, away from the stately villas and incongruously ornate mansions, sits what might seem the creation of a beautifully demented child.

“People either love it or they think it’s the nuttiest thing they’ve ever seen,” says Carl Doumani, owner of the Quixote and the man responsible for bringing Hundertwasser’s vision to California. “But I watch them coming up the path, and I can see them smiling. And that’s the whole idea.”

Or at least much of the idea. The whimsy of a Hundertwasser building belies a strident philosophy of ecology and personal freedom. Born in Vienna in 1928, Hundertwasser began exploring these themes as a painter in the late 1940s. It wasn’t until the 80s that, as an influential artist and thinker, he began bringing his revolutionary notions to life in architectural form. He lived his later years in New Zealand, where he died in 2000 at 71. He was buried under a tulip tree. Just a handful of buildings had been built.

If “the straight line is godless,” as Hundertwasser famously said, the Quixote is a megachurch. Floors curve and roll. Trees rise from the 30 inches of soil covering the roof. No two windows are alike. Found material and assorted organic forms cover the surfaces. Outside, starlings nest atop the majestic dome over Mr. Doumani’s office. (Where they proceed to sully the German gold leaf, he likes to point out, “Birds have absolutely no respect for Hundertwasser.”)

With the Quixote as with Hundertwasser’s entire oeuvre, the aim is to show us that our structures, and by extension our lives, needn’t fit so tidily on the grid nor exist so far afield from nature. When Mr. Doumani, founder of the Stags’ Leap Winery, began considering designs for a second, smaller operation in 1988, he didn’t have this concept in mind. Then, while sitting in the office of a San Francisco architect one day, he spotted a calendar of Hundertwasser’s prints.

“You know,” he recalls saying, “this is more what I’m looking for.”

Mr. Doumani tracked Hundertwasser down that summer and arranged to meet him in Vienna. What he found was an activist as much as an artist, his causes ranging from public transportation to public toilets in New Zealand, license-plate beautification to peace in the Middle East.

He was, as the artist’s manager, Joram Harel, put it, “a completely free person.” He had given himself a new name. He was born Friedrich Stowasser — Friedensreich translates as “liberty kingdom,” Hundertwasser as “hundred waters” — and later tacked on Regentag, or “rainy day,” for good measure. He had delivered lectures in the nude. He had spent several years on a 60-year-old wooden freighter he had purchased in Sicily. He lived on mush made from 100-pound sacks of wheat.

Mr. Doumani, himself one of Napa’s freer souls, took to him instantly.

The two began discussing what the winery might look like, and the job was under way. Since Hundertwasser lacked formal training, an architect in Vienna helped coordinate plans with another in Napa. (Hundertwasser’s initial suggestion of burying the whole thing underground did not go far. “This is California,” Mr. Doumani told him. “We have sunshine, we like to be outside.”)

In the years to follow Hundertwasser and Mr. Doumani each crossed the ocean to see the other four or five times, in addition to sending numerous notes and revisions by mail. The job, executed somewhat sporadically, took almost a decade, and in 1999 Quixote produced its first vintage.

Mr. Doumani says he has since long since lost track of what the entire project cost. “Certainly twice as much as a regular winery,” he’s willing to guess. Nothing was simple.

He recalls trying to find a craftsman who could produce Hundertwasser’s trademark tile columns, which in shape and color resemble giant necklace beads. Nobody in the United States could meet the specifications because the lead paint that gave his colors their earthiness was prohibited. Mr. Doumani’s search took him to Germany, where he at last found someone to do the job. The designs were sent off, the elaborate columns were built and shipped, and, miraculously, the fragile creations arrived intact. Mr. Doumani installed them and proudly showed them off at Hundertwasser’s next visit.

Hundertwasser promptly picked up a hammer, stepped up to the nearest column and shattered it. Doumani’s jaw hung at roughly knee level.

“If they don’t see we use broken materials, they’ll never know,” Hundertwasser said. The hammer would later go to work on a few of the floor tiles too.

While Hundertwasser’s creations grew out of precise theories — that mechanization was killing modern homes, for instance — he specialized in buildings that didn’t require a degree in architecture to appreciate. It generally helped not to have one.

“Architects hated his buildings,” said Nicholas de Monchaux, assistant professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on the intersection of ecology and design. “They were preoccupied with function and urban redevelopment” in the 1980s, he added. “Furry, dirty buildings don’t fit into that.”

Reinforcing that disdain was the impression that Hundertwasser was a kitsch populist (he took issue with those who belittled the so-called low desires of the people), a flouter of popular Modernist ideals (he likened conformity within the movement to slavery) and an unschooled interloper.

“The critics said, ‘This is not architecture, this is a three-dimensional manifesto,’ ” Mr. Harel said. “Well, Hundertwasser agreed. He just wanted to show that the soul perishes in all these traditional buildings, and it’s especially dangerous because you don’t feel it happening. He felt the hidden longing of people to live differently.”

His efforts to make these points occasionally misfired. In 1982 Hundertwasser found himself speaking in the San Francisco offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of America’s largest architecture firms. Illustrating a point about how tenants should be free to leave their own mark on their dwellings, he grabbed a knife and began carving a design on the nearest wall. His point was not appreciated, and he later received a sizable bill for the damaged plaster.

(Mr. Doumani insists architects even threw food at him during one of his lectures, but Mr. Harel disputes that: “Who brings food to a lecture?”)

Meanwhile the public — in Europe, anyway — couldn’t get enough. But Hundertwasser shunned the praise, insisting he was a dilettante and not an architect. “I’m not good,” Mr. Harel recalls him saying. “It’s just that the others are so bad.”

He was rebuked mercilessly for suggesting that architects should put their egos aside and work instead to coax out their clients’ personal visions. He was equally emphatic about drawing out the creativity of the laborers on his projects, Mr. Doumani said.

He continued: “The genius of the guy is, he brings the craftsmen into the process. He always asks, ‘What would you do here?’ And they’d be proud of their choices. On weekends the carpenters, tile guys and plasterers working on the job — they’d be here with their wives or girlfriends, showing them what they’re working on.”

The Quixote, which recently received a land-use permit allowing visitors, isn’t likely to see the million or so visitors that the Hundertwasserhaus, his Vienna public housing project, receives each year. The winery is considerably smaller and lacks the social resonance. More environmentally sophisticated architecture can certainly be found. Still, after viewing any of his creations, one tends to wonder why more buildings don’t look like this.

“Builders will tell you it costs too much, but they’re just looking at its up-front costs,” said Harry Rand, senior curator of cultural history at the Smithsonian Institution and author of “Hundertwasser,” a biography and consideration of the artist’s work. “A Hundertwasser-type building is built with an indefinite lifetime.”

Mr. Rand also asserts that the contentment of such a building’s residents translates to other economic benefits. Tenants of the Vienna housing project get sick less often, and their children perform better in school, he says.

Mr. de Monchaux, the Berkeley professor, contends that contemporary architecture has taken steps toward Hundertwasser-like irreverence. With the digital manufacturing of architectural components and computer-controlled steel-bending machines, wacky shapes are suddenly possible, he said.

Still, he concedes this isn’t quite what Hundertwasser was agitating for. His enthusiasm for rounded and irregular forms grew out of a desire to connect with nature and to tease out the natural creativity of builders and dwellers.

Teasing it out of a computer might well have him rolling over under his tulip tree.

Posted by M at 03:31:12 | Permalink | No Comments »