Las Urbanistas

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

 

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

For example, one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

“Most of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers, so they need a business model that lets them make money in three to six months, which is one growing season,” he said. KickStart accepts grants to support its advertising and find networks of sellers supplied with spare parts, for example. His prospective customers, Dr. Fisher explained, “don’t do market research.”

“Many of them have never left their villages,” he said

City says no to living in shipping containers

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer; Friday, May 11, 2007

(05-11) 17:12 PDT BERKELEY — A Berkeley artists’ collective who built a “Road Warrior”-style beehive of 30 shipping containers announced today it’s moving to Oakland after running afoul of Berkeley’s building department.

Berkeley’s building and fire departments served The Shipyard, a group of several dozen Burning Man veterans, with a “cease and desist” order this week due to ongoing building and fire code violations, said Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief David Orth.

“We don’t want to drive artists out of Berkeley. Their work is cool,” Orth said. “But we can’t have them living in shipping containers.”

Shipyard artists began amassing the shipping containers about five years ago, stacking them two or three together on the group’s industrial lot in West Berkeley near the Emeryville border. The containers are used for studios, performance art, welding and other fire crafts, storage and occasional living quarters.

Shipyard artists have contributed to Burning Man, do-it-yourself fairs, alternative energy conventions and other forums. One of the group’s biggest projects is Neverwas Haul, a three-story Victorian house on wheels that’s powered by steam.

“We’re all going through the stages of death right now — denial, anger, acceptance,” said Shannon O’Hare, creator of Neverwas Haul. “It’s been hard.”

Jim Mason, who holds the lease to the Shipyard lot, wrote on the group’s Web site that today is “a sad day indeed and an end to an era of amazing creativity and alternative energy research.”

Berkeley’s fire and building inspectors first began issuing warnings about three years ago, Orth said. The containers are not seismically safe and some were illegally wired, he said.

The problems were never adequately addressed, and in fact more containers kept arriving, Orth said.

The final straw came when an inspector found electrical wires illegally running from a nearby structure to one of the containers, Orth said.

The Shipyard has never been cited or fined, and is not being forced out now, Orth said.

The artists, however, feel they’ve been trying to work with the city but Berkeley’s codes are too stringent and expensive to comply with.

The containers offer cheap and secure space for local artists, many of whom can’t afford Berkeley’s steep rental prices.

“The boxes are a ‘Road Warrior,’ ‘Waterworld’ castle of steel,” O’Hare said. “They’re completely safe. But the city doesn’t recognize them under the building code.”

E-mail Carolyn Jones at carolynjones@sfchronicle.com.

The new arts library designed by Enrique Norten that was supposed to rise like the prow of a glass ship near the Brooklyn Academy of Music now seems likely to sink, unrealized, into the pavement.

 

All the same, planners say they have raised money for a new theater designed by Hugh Hardy for the academy and hope to break ground next year.

Eight months after the city stepped up its role in overseeing development in what is known as the BAM Cultural District, in Fort Greene, projects are being assessed as viable or unrealistic.

“The library project as designed has not proved to be feasible,” said Kate D. Levin, commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. “However, there is a continued commitment to build on that site and have some component be a library.”

With a revolving door of directors, the Brooklyn Public Library system has not raised any of what it estimates as a $135 million price for the Visual and Performing Arts Library. Initially, the system had planned to break ground on the project in 2005, with a grand opening this year. But two of its directors have come and gone since planning began, and a third, Dionne Mack-Harvin, assumed her post only in March.

In a statement, Ms. Mack-Harvin said yesterday that she still hoped to see a library built in the area. “While at this time we do not have the funds needed to build the V.P.A. as originally envisioned, we are still looking at options for funding, including seeking partners to assist in financing,” she said. “We realize the importance of providing free resources and services to Brooklynites — especially in this rapidly growing area.”

Mr. Norten said he still hoped to design the project in its altered form. “It will have to be a completely new design, but it could be even better,” he said. “I’m very excited about revising all of this.”

With its cantilevered glass envelope, Mr. Norten’s library had drawn wide praise as a bold and colorful design that would anchor the district’s artistic ambitions. Alan H. Fishman, the chairman of the academy, said he was sorry to see it go. “The design was so captivating,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the academy has raised enough pledges to move ahead with designs for a $40 million annex on Ashland Place, bordered by Lafayette Avenue and Hanson Place, that is to include a 300-seat theater, education activities and archives. Mr. Hardy, the architect, is also designing, with Frank Gehry, a new home in the cultural district for the Theater for a New Audience, at Lafayette Avenue and Ashland Place.

Mr. Fishman is also co-chairman of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, created last summer as an umbrella organization to coordinate planning in the area as the city sought to jump-start a languishing redevelopment effort. Among the groups consolidated under the partnership were the BAM Local Development Corporation, which had previously overseen the arts district; the Downtown Brooklyn Council; the Fulton Mall Improvement Association; and the MetroTech Business Improvement District.

Joseph Chan left his post as a senior policy adviser in Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff’s office last September to become president of the partnership.

“I think what you see is tangible progress on all of the major initiatives,” Mr. Chan said. “We wanted to put every project on a design and construction timeline, with clear lines of accountability and a clear set of expectations and milestones.”

The city has $75 million in financing allocated for the cultural district through fiscal 2009. “We want to make sure there is an appropriate marriage of resources, capability and intent for every project we do,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

Some Brooklyn arts executives say the new leadership has made a difference. “This has been a very positive development,” said Harvey Lichtenstein, the former academy impresario who is now chairman of cultural planning for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “It gives it stronger backing from the mayor’s office, from the city and of course in terms of connections.”

The BAM Cultural District was conceived in 2000 as a $650 million effort to revitalize the area by converting vacant and underused properties into spaces for arts organizations. Since then, with the explosion of Brooklyn’s residential real estate market, developers have become an important force in the arts district.

Plans now call for a new headquarters for Danspace Project, which commissions and presents contemporary choreography, to be built at Ashland Place and Fulton Street, with a 20-story residential tower on top. A formal request for proposals went out to developers in February, and responses are due on May 18. David Walentas, the developer behind much of the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, said he would submit a proposal.

Mr. Walentas said he would consider being part of a revised library project that would also include private uses. He declined to elaborate.

The chosen developer is expected to pay for the building’s structure and the apartments, half of which are to be affordable housing. “The city wants to see as big a contribution as possible from the development team,” Mr. Chan said.

Meanwhile, some of those involved are concerned about whether Danspace will be able to raise its own share, estimated at $10 million to $15 million. “They’re a small organization and they’ve never done this kind of fund-raising,” Mr. Lichtenstein said. “But I’m going to help them.”

The city said it had not yet determined its contribution to the Danspace headquarters, which is intended to offer affordable studio space to a multitude of choreographers.

In a few weeks, the Theater for a New Audience, an Off Broadway company that produces Shakespeare and classical drama, is expected to present new designs for a building that would be its first permanent home. The landscape architect Ken Smith was selected in December to design a public plaza and streetscape for the new district. In March the city issued a request for proposals for a multilevel underground parking garage topped by a public plaza in the district.

Not all of Brooklyn is enthusiastic about the way the district has evolved. Some public officials worry that the private development will price out local residents, and complain that Brooklyn cultural groups have been sidelined.

“I want indigenous organizations incorporated into the district,” said City Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents Fort Greene.

Yet other projects are still being dreamed up. Mr. Lichtenstein, for example, said he would like to see a “major visual art facility.”

“I always had this crazy vision of Brooklyn being the Left Bank of New York,” he added. “It’s not so crazy anymore.”

Moving ‘The Awakening’ Sculpture Is Just the Start for $2 Billion Venture

By Anita Huslin Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 22, 2007; A01

Milt Peterson looks upon the artist renderings of National Harbor with the critical eye of a general. It’s like nothing Washington has ever seen.

Sail-shaped banners line the Potomac waterfront, with moving images projected on the fabric. A retractable, 42-foot video screen stretches between two masts for outdoor movies. Stonehenge-like boulders alternate with larger-than-life bronze statues along the promenade leading to the water. In his mind’s eye, Peterson sees concerts, sailboat races, sunset cruises, fireworks, maybe even water ballet.

Until now, the piece de resistance of his National Harbor project has been a carefully guarded secret. In the coming months, the outdoor sculpture “The Awakening” will be dug up from Hains Point, its home for the past 27 years, then barged and trucked to an undisclosed location where it will be cleaned and restored.

 

Then, the 70-foot work, which depicts a giant struggling to emerge from the earth, will be planted in a new sandy beach on the other side of the Potomac River. “There’ll be steps going down, and there’ll be Charlie, on the beach,” Peterson says, sweeping his arms open wide like Vanna White, and tilting his 6-foot-2, lanky frame back in his office chair. “That’s what I call putting the fat chicken on the front hook.”

After a lifetime of building suburban subdivisions, office parks and shopping centers and malls, Peterson, 71, is about to make his biggest and perhaps most indelible mark on the suburban Washington landscape. A year from now, he will unveil the first phase of a $2 billion streetscape of white-tablecloth dining, retail, executive offices and luxury waterfront homes at the southern tip of Prince George’s County. There’ll be water taxis to and from Alexandria and the District, sightseeing tours and a public marina.

On a recent spring morning, Peterson flies in his personal jet up to Rochester to meet with the artist who is creating the 85-foot steel sculpture for National Harbor’s entrance. It will set the tone for the place, like the Statue of Liberty, he says. People will see it coming off the Wilson Bridge, curled and rippling steel rising skyward, like a Technicolor beacon to the harbor.

“We’re putting something fabulous on the river that says it’s special,” he says. “It’s going to be POW! It’s going to be explosive! We’re going to change Washington.”

Building a Reputation

Peterson, who lives in Fairfax, began making a name for himself almost as soon as he moved to Northern Virginia after college with his childhood sweetheart and wife, Carolyn. As a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, he worked for Stephen Yeonas, one of the biggest developers in the growing region. In a short time, Peterson became the first salesman to surpass the $1-million-a-year mark. By 23, he was running the entire sales force.

Striking out on his own, he began building small townhouse developments, eventually partnering with a young attorney, John T. “Til” Hazel, who remembers Peterson’s insistence on carving out sites for churches, raising construction money and developing the sites when local congregations formed.

Peterson’s gregarious, folksy personality charmed skeptics, recalls Hazel, now a prominent Northern Virginia real estate developer, and enabled him to reach accommodations with opponents. He made a name building communities with shopping and office parks such as Fair Lakes and Burke Center in Virginia. His company also redeveloped downtown Silver Spring.

Peterson has spent millions in more than a decade since he bought the National Harbor site to build a legacy where others have tried and failed.

The footings of developer James T. Lewis’s PortAmerica, which was thwarted by permit troubles, federal and local opposition and ultimately, financial problems, lie beneath the earth under National Harbor. Lewis had bought the property from developer James H. Burch, who in the early 1980s had proposed but failed to produce Bay of America, a mix of townhouses and offices that he said at the time would be “more visible than even Tysons Corner.”

To circumvent the opposition the earlier projects attracted from environmentalists and regulatory agencies, Peterson lobbied in the late 1990s to have jurisdiction over the project shifted to Prince George’s County from the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission. It took three years and tens of thousands of dollars in lobbying costs, but Congress complied. The state also kicked in nearly $300 million in aid. The justification, according to county documents, was the estimated $1.8 billion in tax benefits from National Harbor.

Peterson had built more than 40,000 homes and 18 million square feet of commercial space in Northern Virginia, but interest in National Harbor has been greater than anything he has done in his 50 years as a developer.

Pressured by Prince George’s officials, he established a 30 percent minority business participation in the project. Peterson also agreed to spend $3.5 million over 10 years on community initiatives, a commitment that caused him headaches when The Post reported this month that money was given to groups that hadn’t applied for it.

Nevertheless, Peterson is closer to making this project a reality than any developer before him. Four hotels, three office buildings, three residential buildings, five restaurants and 4,500 parking spaces are well underway. The flagship Gaylord hotel, a critical anchor to the development, has already booked nearly 900,000 room nights and next week will top off its 10-story building.

To make all this happen, Peterson jumped through every hoop he saw. Even then, he hasn’t always gotten his way.

Earlier this spring, his company requested a state liquor permit that would allow National Harbor guests to stroll parts of the grounds with cocktails in hand. A Prince George’s County official expressed unhappiness that he heard about the measure indirectly. His office summoned Peterson to provide details of the proposal — personally.

Peterson recalls the moment with a furrowed brow, pauses, then slaps his thigh and drawls, “Come on, boy, giddyup!” lampooning the official.

He laughs now at the memory. “I said, ‘Certainly, sir. Right away, sir.’ ” Then he sits back in his leather chair and takes a long slug of scotch. A low growl rumbles from his throat. “That’s business.”

A Changing Landscape

“The Awakening” has been part of the Washington landscape for so long that it is widely considered public property. Artist J. Seward Johnson installed it at Hains Point in 1980 as part of an international sculpture conference. He had wanted to donate it, but the National Park Service could not accept site-specific art gifts, according to Paula Stoeke, director of the Sculpture Foundation, which ultimately took title to the piece and maintained it. “The piece has enjoyed such an affectionate relationship with the community and visitors to Washington over the years,” she said.

Peterson is among its many admirers. Several years ago, he saw an item in the paper about the sculpture being for sale. He bought it recently for about $750,000, signing a confidentiality agreement with the foundation not to disclose the purchase. It is unclear what, if anything, may take its place on Hains Point, but Johnson recently wrote in a letter to Peterson: “I have reviewed the plans made for the location and I think it will be perfect . . . Charlie, as I understand he is now dubbed, should be very happy in his new home.”

Moving the sculpture away from the District could create a stir, Peterson realizes. That’s exactly what he’s looking for.

You want it to be controversial, he says. Provocative. The worst thing would be no reaction at all. Peterson wants to throw in some history at National Harbor, too, and is talking to an artist about making a trio of sculptures that tell how surveyor Benjamin Banneker, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson helped design the District. Though plans change daily, he’s thinking the pieces will look good gazing beyond the two, 750-foot piers and the party tent toward the District. Bob Weis, senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, is advising on the sculptures.

“We need to be emotional and patriotic and family-oriented,” Weis said. “It’s not going to be Disneyland, but it’s not Williamsburg either.”

Peterson is clearly pleased by models of the two stainless-steel eagles that will soar from 65-foot poles at the top of a long flight of steps leading to the water. (He’s dubbed the pair, which cost $700,000 apiece, Martha and George, for the American bald eagles that once nested on National Harbor property.)

Sculptor Stuart Paley shows him the mock-up of the beacon to be erected amidst a stand of birch trees at the National Harbor entrance. It’s a modern sculpture shaped vaguely like a torch flame, with tendrils of intertwined steel reaching toward the sky. It is intended to evoke patriotism, freedom, energy, light and creative potential.

Peterson folds his arms, puts one hand on his chin and cocks his head. He asks Paley what colors it will be. Yellow and red, Paley answers, blending into orange and rust below. Peterson says, “It’s great, it’s going to be great,” then he pauses.

“I have a 35 percent feeling that I’m looking at the back. The other side looks more front-y, this looks more back-y,” Peterson says.

“This is a gestural piece,” Paley explains. “Like with the Statue of Liberty, there’s a front and a back.”

“Is this the back?” Peterson asks, peering around the model. “If people look at it and they don’t get it, they feel stupid,” he mutters.

Paley agrees to add some swooping strands of steel to make the back of the sculpture look less like a rear view.

‘Stay With What You Know’

National Harbor is the biggest gamble Peterson has taken, but it is hardly the first. When he was 14, his father bought a mango crop and drove the family to Florida to live there while the fruit ripened. At harvest time, young Milt — not even old enough for a driver’s license — would pick up day laborers in his father’s beat-up station wagon and drive them to the orchard.

Sixteen years ago, he bought a shrimp farm in Belize at the suggestion of an enthusiastic friend, ultimately producing 14.8 million pounds of shrimp each year. But he ended up dumping it at a loss two years ago as shrimp prices plummeted under pressure from the cheap, abundant Southeast Asian seafood market.

“The big-picture message from that was like Robert Frost said, the woodcutter cuts wood. Stay with what you know,” Peterson says. “But sometimes that can be boring. You need to try different things.”

At the end of the day, he has been known to take a front-end loader for a spin around the National Harbor construction site to check on things, maybe move a little dirt. At least twice, he has driven his SUV into the Potomac, engrossed in watching the giant earth-movers, concrete mixers and pile drivers building his project.

“There are people who suffer through making widgets all day and they never find happiness,” Peterson says. “Real estate is the greatest thing in the world because you’re building something that’s going to stay.”

He pauses a moment. “I just don’t want to screw it up,” he says, “because I’m going to have to look at it for the rest of the time I’m here.”

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Already, Mojo is making people uneasy.

They don’t know what to make of this angular robot that stands like a sentry atop a 30-foot pole on a San Pedro street corner. When pedestrians walk by, it eventually will shine a roving light on them, following them along the sidewalk.

Maybe its giant orange-rimmed eye is an undercover security camera, they speculate. Maybe it’s a floodlight, or a laser gun, or a cleverly disguised dish for satellite TV.

Actually, Mojo is an artwork created by Christian Moeller, a UCLA design professor who has won widespread acclaim for interactive pieces on display in Tokyo; Frankfurt, Germany; London and New York.

Mojo won’t start moving its robotic arm for another few weeks. But some in this seaport neighborhood of Los Angeles say they don’t understand it or like it. Some in local arts circles frown because an outsider rather than a homegrown artist has taken center stage.

“It’s not a piece of art that’s really resonated with the public or the arts community,” said Life on the Edge local blog contributor Marshall Astor, an artist and the visual arts director at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro. “There’s a percentage of people who think it’s ridiculous.”

Still, he added, “It could grow on people. I’m hoping it grows on me.”

It’s not so much that folks oppose an odd-looking sculpture in their midst. They are suspicious because Mojo, guided by two surveillance cameras, homes in on passersby with a light.

“Orwellian,” one critic wrote on the blog. Another called it the “perfect quasi-bohemian yuppie bait,” allowing condo owners to feel more artsy and, at the same time, more secure against car thefts.

Some have started to enjoy the sinister feel of it all.

“It’s creepy. I like creepy,” said another local artist, Daniel Nord.

Mojo stands in front of the Centre Street Lofts, a new condominium development that is drawing well-heeled buyers to units that start in the high $300,000s. The sculpture at 7th and Centre streets overlooks a seedy intersection better known for the Godmother Saloon, the low-rent Hotel Cabrillo and Anytime Happy Liquor.

Mike Saunders, a disabled veteran who lives in one room at the hotel, is so taken with the robot that he propped a canvas on his fire escape and started painting. His unfinished acrylic shows Mojo zapping a small human figure with a laser. Saunders said he meant that in jest, a reflection of his neighbors’ wariness.

“I don’t care if everyone hates it. I love it,” said Saunders, 47. “Life is too serious. Here is something nonsensical, right in front of you. A tangible cartoon, you could call it.”

Brent Kuhn, project engineer with Carlson & Co., which fabricated the sculpture, thinks of Mojo as a lonely robot, moving about aimlessly in the dark until it locks onto a passerby with a beam of light.

“It’s looking for a companion,” Kuhn said.

Developer Harlan Lee, who recommended Moeller for the $252,000 project, is not surprised by the stir. It reminds him of the initial reaction to “Ballerina Clown,” the 1989 moving sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky that accompanies a building Lee developed at Main Street and Rose Avenue in Venice.

Some people called the clown perverted and ugly. L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, however, described it as a momentous piece of public art, “a figure rather like an eccentric, street side orator magically elevated to civic symbol.”

Lee Homes and the CIM Group developed Centre Street Lofts and had to commit 1% of development costs to public art because the project is in a redevelopment zone.

“What I wanted,” Lee said, “was something that’s interactive with the people, something that will create dialogue.”

Moeller said he anticipated spirited debate — but not before Mojo has started sweeping the sidewalks with light.

How can people interpret a work of art, he asked, before it is finished?

Moeller, 47, is known for art that juxtaposes humans with technology. A 2004 piece at London’s Science Museum consisted of a stainless steel pole surrounded by a round sign warning, “Do Not Touch.” Those who touched the pole received a mild electric shock.

Mojo is one of the first in a series of robotic projects, Moeller said. In Tokyo, a robot called Nosy uses a camera to record images of passersby and project their silhouettes on three tall towers.

He said Mojo was inspired by the dozens of cargo cranes, with their robot-like arms, bristling along the waterfront. The light is modeled on Angel’s Gate lighthouse.

“When you put a sophisticated industrial machine and a lighthouse together, you get Mojo,” he said.

He winces at the notion that the robot is a glorified security system. The surveillance cameras that guide the robot do not even record images, he said. Still, Mojo conveys the same eerie feel of being spied upon that people experience at seaports, airports and train stations in a post-9/11 world.

“It makes a big deal visually out of ‘I am watching you,’ ” Moeller said.

When Mojo starts moving, San Pedrans may find it more endearing.

Moeller reached for his laptop and pulled up an early animation of Mojo craning its neck giraffe-style to see a passerby, then withdrawing, like an amiable character in a cartoon.

“It’s the forgotten guy sitting on its pedestal,” he said.

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deborah.schoch@latimes.com

*

A video of Mojo and a link to other examples of Christian Moeller’s work can be found at http://www.latimes.com/mojo .

In a new twist to the juggling act at ground zero, the city said yesterday that the Signature Theater Company would not be included in a performing arts center to be designed there by Frank Gehry, leaving the Joyce Theater, which presents dance, as the building’s sole resident.

Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff said the Signature, an Off Broadway group, was dropped because of the cost and complicated logistics of having the two institutions share a confined space.

Instead the city hopes to move the Signature to Fiterman Hall at 30 West Broadway, cater-corner to 7 World Trade Center. Fiterman, part of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, was heavily damaged by falling debris on 9/11.

Estimates of the performing arts center’s cost were approaching $700 million, city officials said. Under the new plan, the center and a new Signature Theater are expected to come in at about $350 million combined.

“The city said it was going to be too costly to do it, and I think they’re right,” said James Houghton, artistic director of the Signature. “Frankly, it’s refreshing to get this straight talk about it. I don’t think anyone wants to build a $700 million performing arts center.”

Mr. Doctoroff said the decision would “result in substantial savings and hopefully improved facilities for both institutions.”

Yet the decision highlights the striking way the original cultural ambitions for ground zero have been scaled back. In June 2004, state and city officials selected four arts groups for a coveted place at the site with great fanfare, predicting that ground zero would become a cultural mecca. Only the Joyce remains now.

The City University of New York, which oversees the Fiterman Hall site, had been working on a renovation with architects at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners before the Signature became involved. Mr. Houghton said that while he still hoped to collaborate with Mr. Gehry on the interior, he was not disappointed that ground zero was off the table.

“We have the potential to reach all of the goals we were after downtown and do it in a more realistic way,” he said.

Mr. Gehry said he would be happy to stay with the project. “I’m used to rolling with the punches,” he said. “I will try to rise to the occasion.”

In a separate development, the Drawing Center in SoHo, which was pushed out of the ground zero plan in 2005 amid controversy over its programming, is now likely to move to the South Street Seaport, city officials said. Last year the Drawing Center seemed poised to relocate to a site occupied by part of the old Fulton Fish Market. But Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said that proved too expensive because the site, on Pier 18 on South Street, needed significant repairs and must conform with codes involving maritime use.

Instead the Drawing Center is hoping to move to Burling Slip, at John Street, between Front and South Streets, a location under lease to the South Street Seaport Museum. “They will be in a major site of development,” Ms. Levin said, noting the city’s recent efforts to revitalize the East Side waterfront. “There are very few visual arts venues south of Canal.”

George Negroponte, the Drawing Center’s president, said he was excited about the Burling Slip location but emphasized that no deal had been completed. “This is a fantastic site,” he said. “A critical mass is finally being established, and it looks terrific for downtown.”

The Drawing Center was supposed to share a building at ground zero with a proposed International Freedom Center, but the Freedom Center was scuttled after family members of 9/11 victims questioned whether its themes would be sufficiently patriotic. Now that museum building, designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta, has been redesignated as the site of a memorial museum and a visitors’ center.

Although the Joyce will have the performing arts center to itself, the building may occasionally be used for nondance events like the Tribeca Film Festival, which takes place each spring. “I’m delighted that we’re moving forward,” said Linda Shelton, executive director of the Joyce. “The project has been stalled for quite some time. It now feels like we have a genuine partner in the city.”

After the downtown rebuilding effort was repeatedly stymied, the city took over from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation last fall. “What we did for months was a detailed review of the engineering, cost and programmatic issues to make sure what was proposed was really not workable,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”

The city explored the Fiterman Hall location before broaching the idea to the Signature, Mr. Houghton said. It also considered moving the Signature into other buildings on the Trade Center site but found that their elevator cores were unsuitable. For now the Signature is also considering two other CUNY sites downtown, although Mr. Houghton said he preferred Fiterman Hall for its proximity to the performing arts center and the transportation hub.

Over the last three years, the Signature and the Joyce have been trying to figure out how to share the challenging Trade Center site between Vesey and Fulton Streets, next to the Freedom Tower. “There are five stories below grade — two trains, a mall and a parking lot all underneath there, many stakeholders,” Mr. Houghton noted. “It’s probably the most complicated site for a performing arts center in the world.”

The Joyce wanted a 900- to 1,000-seat theater, while maintaining its current sites in Chelsea and SoHo. The Signature, a showcase for American playwrights on West 42nd Street, planned a three-theater complex. Because of the performing arts center’s limited footprint, the theaters would have to be stacked, making it difficult for the audiences to proceed up and down.

Still unclear is how much the city might contribute for the cultural buildings and what amount the arts groups will be responsible for.

Ms. Levin predicted that with 1,000 seats, the new Joyce would fill a niche in the city. Existing theaters have 499 and 599 seats, then jump to about 2,000 in size, she said, and some prominent dance companies bypass New York as a result. The Joyce is also considering a casual cafe that could be used for daytime performances and small concerts.

But the coast is by no means clear. According to the current timetable, construction cannot start on the Joyce site until 2011 because it will be occupied until then by a temporary exit from the PATH train. “It’s frustrating, because of course you lose momentum,” Ms. Shelton said. “But I’m hoping it can move forward more quickly than that.”

The Signature has more urgent constraints, since the lease at its 42nd Street location expires in 2011. “The clock is ticking for us,” Mr. Houghton said.

 

What makes a house a home is a topic suitable for poetry. But a house or a home is always something else. It is property. Does this fact contain poetry? Probably not. But it does contain entertainment. It’s a form of television entertainment I’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to until I got involved in buying property myself, which happened right around the time that the long housing boom was unraveling last year. Previously invisible to me, these entertainments were, for months, the only things I wanted to watch. Buying, selling, updating, restoring and “flipping” for quick profits — it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn’t remember if the title of a certain show was “Flip This House” or “Flip That House.”

It turned out these were two different shows, and with every “pain of U.S. housing slump” headline, the inventory of real estate entertainment looked a little more glutty. It made me ponder this curious genre’s fate. Like sunny sellers’ agents, television executives and producers assured me that such shows had a post-housing-bubble future that was already in the works. I looked for signs of what that might mean as I watched, and pondered just what it was I was tuning in to see.

HOW TO EXPRESS THE SELF

In the distant world of 1980, episodes of “This Old House” began appearing nationally on PBS stations, documenting the restoration of an 1860 Victorian in Boston. Long, calm, detailed and earnest, the project carried the warm glow of education and New England do-goodism. In time, “This Old House” became a franchise (multiple shows, books, a magazine); its original star, a builder named Bob Vila, left in a dispute over endorsement deals and became a brand unto himself. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic — or at least the phrase “do it yourself” — became a trendy idea.

Entertainment is supposed to be better in the hundreds-of-channels present than it was in 1980, but of course new places for expressing ideas do not guarantee new ideas. The upshot is that what used to be a concept for a show is now the basis for a genre, in the form of dozens of shows, entire channels, a category. The HGTV channel went on the air in 1994 and is now in more than 91 million homes; it’s owned by Scripps Networks (which also owns DIY Network, Food Network and Fine Living). HGTV is a soft, warm, pleasant place where nice ladies make quilts during the day and nice young couples redecorate at night and lots of “tips” are shared. Here the home is an expression of the self: Michael Dingley, senior vice president for programming and content strategy, says the channel aims to “provide ideas and inspiration, to make the home better.” He continues, “And I don’t mean home as in the sense of four walls, but also home in a more emotional kind of way, more abstract.”

In 1999, the channel started “House Hunters,” which is now on five nights a week and is among its most popular shows. On each episode, the hostess, a genial automaton called Suzanne Whang — always shown wandering through some anonymous suburban environment — gives us a chipper sketch of the house hunter and his or her desires (the software engineer seeking a shorter commute, the single mom looking for space, the tedious young English prof who wants to have poets over more often, etc.) and three available choices. She remains in her undisclosed location as we follow the hunter through the houses, scrutinizing pros and cons, while canned music plays just audibly enough to subtly suggest that something is happening. The episodes conclude with a decision, and usually a coda about how it all worked out perfectly.

In part, “House Hunters” simply recreates the way that property functions as entertainment in the real world: like scanning the real estate pages for new listings and going to open houses, it’s a part of the mildly voyeuristic pastime of “seeing what’s out there,” of taking a peek at how other people live, a crash course on the market in Chicago or Atlanta or elsewhere.

Along with HGTV’s home design shows, Dingley maintains, such programming demystifies property, and has “enlightened and empowered consumers.” He uses the phrase “relevant entertainment.” On “House Hunters” you may learn that $379K gets you a surprisingly nice 3 BR, 2000 SF, 1927 Craftsman in Seattle. But by and large these happy families are all the same: enlightened and empowered to congratulate themselves for having the same instinct for which wallpaper is “dated” and which mantle has “a lot of character” that everybody on all the other shows has.

Meanwhile, much is left out. Buyer’s remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites. In an episode of “House Hunters,” a cute young New Jersey couple move to the shore, specifically to Asbury Park, which Whang brightly calls “a majestic boardwalk town.” Have you ever been to Asbury Park? She adds that the place was made famous by the songs of Bruce Springsteen, and that’s true. For instance, it inspired “My City of Ruins.”

HGTV, Dingley explains, is not a “mean-spirited” place. “We’re not a snarky, mean, nasty brand.” Perhaps the channel offers shelter from gloomy homeowner news. “For most folks, a home is not only the most expensive investment in their lives, it’s also the most personal,” he says, and a rockier housing market sharpens the viewers’ interest in “making the right, prudent decision.” That said, its “relevant” programming has been expanding to encompass a bit more of the things that have dominated property entertainment on those networks that are a little less concerned about how mean-spiritedness might affect the brand: namely, money and drama.

HOW TO BE GREEDIER

The American entertainment consumer surely seeks enlightenment on matters of taste and style, but also on that other key aspect of the self, net worth. The soaring stock market of the late 1990s made CNBC almost as popular as CNN, supposedly because we’d become an enlightened and empowered nation of investors, but really because bull market geniuses loved watching a game they never seemed to lose. Tanking markets cleared up the difference between personal finance and rollicking fun, and CNBC’s viewership retreated to niche levels. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic of “This Old House” and the Something for Nothing ethic of Nasdaq-as-sporting-event come together in the form of the flip shows. Don’t make a home, don’t invest in a house — flip a property: how much money, how fast, for how little effort, can be extracted from a shabby, crumbling residence? Booyah! — as CNBC throwback Jim Cramer might shout — now you’ve got something.

TLC has included home-related programming since 1997 (starting with Bob Vila’s post-”This Old House” project, “Bob Vila’s Home Again”). And its show “Trading Spaces” — in which neighbors redecorate each other’s homes — was a home-entertainment milestone. The network began airing “Flip That House” in 2005. Every half-hour episode features a different “flipper,” some experienced, some with no particular background in real estate or construction but with an interest in what (on television at least) sounds like easy money. We learn the purchase price, tour the generally ramshackle property, and listen to an overview of planned updates and renovations. Usually a demolition montage follows: carpets ripped out, off-trend cabinetry smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer. Episodes involving experienced flippers tend to go rather smoothly, and I suppose the instructional payoff for the viewer comes in the form of tips. These generally involve granite countertops, Brazilian cherry wood floors, travertine tile. Often, the tips are communicated in the form of orders issued to the stoic head of some all-Hispanic construction crew, who simply nods.

The profit motive obliterates home-ness and all other topics. An episode involving a guy named Hay, who is “in the entertainment industry,” and restores houses in the area once known as South Central Los Angeles so he can rent them, begins: “The 1992 riots tore the city apart. But now it’s become an attractive destination for house flippers, hoping to turn their property into profit.” He goes over budget, and we learn to use angled paint brushes. When he’s done, the real estate agent says he can get $1,600 a month for the place.

The vague idea of learning from the pros animates “Flip That House” rival “Flip This House,” which runs on A&E. “We’re constantly looking to evolve the shelter brand,” executive producer Michael Morrison informs me. “And one of the trends in real estate, obviously, is house flipping.” “Flip This House” also made its debut in 2005, and rather than an endless series of flippers, revolves around recurring sets of real estate pros. The first season followed Trademark Properties, based near Charleston, S. C. and run by Richard C. Davis. The second season has focused on two different realty teams, one in San Antonio and one in Atlanta. “Flip This House” episodes each last an hour, and what’s added to the mix of tips are basic elements of drama. Most notably, the stars get more full-fledged character treatment.

The San Antonio shows are the serialized adventures of Armando and David Montelongo, who are brothers, and their wives. The series works more because the people happen to be entertaining than because they happen to work in real estate. Armando in particular has just the sort of polarizing charisma that can carry a show. A charming jerk, he lowballs subcontractors, bullies an unpaid intern and taunts his wife with a fistful of roaches grabbed from the kitchen of one nasty property he has acquired, pausing now and again to reflect on the all-American success story of his life so far.

In one episode, for no obvious reason, the brothers and their wives compete, flipping two houses at once to see who can make more money. By the time girls in bikinis arrive to distract one team’s subcontractors with free beer, the Enlightened Improvement ethic has been reduced to occasional text popping up on the screen making never-substantiated assertions about how much “value” a new fence or windows supposedly add to the final sales price.

Davis of Trademark Properties will be back on television soon enough, as it happens, with a new show over on TLC. It’s called “The Real Deal,” and it will, as he describes it, be firmly about the business of real estate. Davis is a creature relatively rare in entertainment but commonplace in real life: The Southern hustler, who doesn’t care what slow-witted stereotypes you read into his accent as long as he gets your money. Davis — still involved in a lawsuit against A&E that he filed after the channel decided to use those other groups in the second season of “Flip This House” — sounds flat-out thrilled about the end of the housing bubble.

Seven years ago, real estate was dominated by “A players” like him. Eventually, “you got to the point where you got your F players in the game—and making money!” Now that that’s over, “it becomes survival of the fittest, and cash becomes king,” he says, and the banks start telling loan-seeking F players to go back to their day jobs. He believes that this will be good not only for Trademark, but for his show. “Flip This House,” he says, ignored the important point that the key to his business isn’t mere remodeling prowess; it’s knowing how to find properties that are a bargain to begin with. The premise of his show is that he is an inspiring, visionary entrepreneur, and a down market will only make that clearer. “That’s when I’ll entertain you the most,” he says. “My most dramatic deals are always in a down market. That’s when it gets really crazy, and really fun.”

HOW TO ENJOY THE MISFORTUNE OF OTHERS

Watching other people make money because they’re smarter than I am doesn’t actually sound like that much fun, but there’s little danger of it on another flip show on TLC that I found perversely gripping, “Property Ladder.” All reality shows rise and fall on casting, and despite the show-opening tease (“Want to make more money in a few months than you did last year?”), here the producers seem bent on finding “real estate rookies” capable of catastrophe. One episode involved lunkhead buddies who got interested in house-flipping through an infomercial. In another, a newly married couple more or less disintegrate over the course of an ill-fated, months-long flip fiasco. Shouting matches feature prominently in nearly every installment.

Like “Flip That House,” the show focuses on a different project every week. The twist is an expert named Kirsten Kemp (billed as a veteran house flipper, she also, somewhat curiously, happens to have a bit-part acting résumé that includes appearances on “JAG” and “Married With Children”), who shows up periodically to give advice and pass judgment. My favorite episode involved a Simi Valley couple who bought a “wrecked” and “abandoned” house for $435,000 and not only planned to flip it for $600,000 after putting in $50,000 worth of renovations over 10 weeks, but pledged to do so in an eco-friendly manner. “We’re really supporting the planet this way,” the wife cheerfully explains, wearing an unconvincing smile that stays frozen on her face through the many disasters that follow.

Kemp openly scoffs at the particulars of their budget and makes a face when told about plans for a solar panel. She tells them they’re better off putting French doors in the master bedroom — that way they will actually add some value. Perhaps what ensues can be characterized as advice. The smiling wife buys eco-trendy bamboo flooring but “violated her green ideals,” as the near-mocking narrator puts it, when tiles made from recycled material prove too expensive. They also blow off some “energy efficient” windows in favor of the French doors that Kemp suggested, and of course they give up on the solar panel scheme as time runs short and their spending balloons. And when Kemp returns toward the end of the show, they inform her (big smile from the wife here) that not only did they opt not to install air conditioning, but they’re going to sell the house themselves so they won’t have to pay a real estate agent’s fee.

Kemp is TV-attractive, articulate and informed, but her most fascinating quality is her two-faced snakiness. She hugs her amateur charges, softens her stern advice and raised eyebrows with compliments and smiles - and then, alone with the camera, coldly enumerates how they blew it. In this case, Simi Valley’s summer highs average 91 degrees, and the for-sale-by-owner approach just proves that in addition to being naive, the eco-flippers are greedy. It will end up costing them money, she announces. And indeed, the show closes with a montage of months passing with no offer; an end note says they finally went with a listing service, and found a buyer, after more than six months. Cackling on my sofa, I’m pleasantly blasé about where I stand in the property zeitgeist. Aside from inspirational business savvy or handy news you can use, here’s another thing that’s entertaining: schadenfreude.

HOW TO ESCAPE REALITY

Property shows seem so profoundly American — it is our manifest destiny to own a 4,000-square-foot place in a good school district within five years of obtaining a college degree — it’s a disappointment to learn that the contemporary property entertainment model is largely an import. “Hot Property,” which first aired on Channel 5 in Britain in 1997, involved a prospective home buyer looking at three houses. The original “Property Ladder” runs on Channel 4.

Fenton Bailey is one of the founders of World of Wonder Productions, which creates programming for both the American and British markets. He’s British, and he lives in Los Angeles. Not everything works in both markets. A World of Wonder show that aired in Britain, “Housebusters,” addressed the problems of various homeowners — can’t make friends in the neighborhood, can’t seem to save any money since moving — by bringing in supernatural types like a “geopathic stress” expert, an electromagnetics guy, a feng shui advocate, a psychic and even a witch. Americans, he says, seem uninterested in home solutions that are less tangible than, say, buying a plasma-screen television, and Bravo passed on a United States pilot.

But the markets also have much in common. The key to property drama, Bailey says, is the key to all drama: transformation. “Very little of what’s on television is about accepting who you are and being happy with it. The old you, the threadbare you — no one wants to know about that.” If anything, he says, the British housing market has been even more overheated than the United States market, and got that way earlier. And finally, he says, “The destiny of television is to put everything on television,” so housing shows had to happen at some point.

“Buildings and interiors have been only something the very rich can enjoy,” Bailey continues. “They formed an elite pastime that’s been absolutely democratized by television.” World of Wonder also happens to be responsible for “Million Dollar Listing,” which ran on Bravo last year and probably made real estate more entertaining than any other single show, not least because it took place in Malibu, a world well beyond the reach of most of the democratized audience.

Over the course of six episodes, “Million Dollar Listing” deconstructed transactions and failed transactions in astonishing detail, giving a more complete version of the harrowing mix of emotions and egos and half-truths of the property drama. Getting suitable access to so many buyers, sellers and agents consumes a great deal of time, and Bailey says the first season of “Million Dollar Listing” took nearly a year to complete; a second season is being cast now. Bailey doesn’t sound worried about what effect the housing slump might have on the show, and it’s easy to see why. “Million Dollar Listing” deals with falling property values by unfolding in the borderline freak show of high-dollar Southern California, with characters who make Armando Montelongo look like a cream puff as they whine and wheedle in the never-ending sunlight of this promised land. By now we are far from “This Old House,” where an earnest discussion of cabinet installation might last three or four minutes and include the phrase “medium density fiberboard with a thermofoil wrap.” The only practical bit that I picked up from “Million Dollar Listing” was the superiority of “whitewater” ocean views to regular old ocean views. You can’t get any further away from everyday reality without actually making things up.

HOW TO OBLITERATE THE SELF

“Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway.” So observes Frank Bascombe, narrator of Richard Ford’s novel “The Lay of the Land.” Bascombe drifted into realty in Ford’s earlier novel “Independence Day,” and while he may have done so in order “to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear,” he is perhaps the wisest observer of property drama we are likely to have.

The agony of property, for example, is rarely more visceral than in the long episode in “Independence Day” in which Bascombe deals with a Vermont couple whose problems will most likely not be solved by a new home in New Jersey. “The realty dreads,” in his view, are never about lost money or the wrong house, but “in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold.” Thus when Bascombe successfully leads clients “toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness,” he achieves an outcome that is “not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive.”

Television, however, differs from literature in the following way. The dramatic shows, for all their tears and shouting matches, in the end, read as harmless, campy cartoons. It’s the happy shows full of smiles and high-fives — the ones that loudly promise us that you need not worry about unchinkable molds when you can consider how much airier the living room will feel if you simply move that sofa — where, every so often, thin cracks in the happy facade can reveal things wholly unintended.

One of HGTV’s newer hits, for instance, is the perfectly upbeat “Designed to Sell.” A relatively winning host named Clive introduces us to someone who is having trouble selling a home and brings in experts to improve things as much as possible for $2,000. One step in the process involves the homeowners watching a videotape of a real estate agent walking from room to room, enumerating what they’ve done wrong. The basic lessons recur over and over: reduce clutter, define the space, brighten up this bedroom, do something about the dated window treatments, and please, American house sellers, pack away your myriad collections of weird figurines immediately. What we learn, in other words, is that despite the supposed home-design revolution, you people have not gotten the point.

Clive and a rotating crew of design experts soften the blow by reminding the homeowners, and us, just what the point is: money. “More light, more space . . . more money,” one designer announces. Replace this “losing-money lime” color with a “money-making mushroom” hue, Clive advises, and “Top dollar!” he says, many times. So the homeowners shrug off the remarks about their grandmotherly decor by smiling and saying, for instance, “Ka-ching!’ Or in one episode, huddling with the design team and chanting, “One, two, three — money!”

A remarkably similar show called “Sell This House,” on A&E, stars Tanya Memme, a high-energy party girl type who favors plunging necklines and has no obvious skills, and a bulbous-muscled bear named Roger, identified as a “home design consultant.” In this version, the flummoxed homeowner listens to the snide, videotaped remarks of random prospective home buyers. The most crushing episode involved a faultlessly polite Southern woman whose wallpaper looked to be 31 years old for the simple reason that she had never stopped liking it. Other features of her long time home include shag carpeting, a mind-boggling menagerie of tchotckes and a mailbox done over to resemble a fish. The videotaped critiques are much what you’d expect, with the added insult of some ill-mannered oaf saying that the place “smells like old people.”

“I will admit,” this sweet woman tells Tanya Memme, “I did cry.” She knows full well that her things might seem idiosyncratic — but they are her things. And she cannot for the life of her see what difference that makes. “If they buy the house, there won’t be any of this stuff here,” she says, reasonably. “That was my version.”

Here we learn the ultimate lesson of these shows: You can look at a free-standing building wherein some persons reside, and you can spin house-or-home poetry out of that all day long. But at the end of that day, property is what it is. Your home can look like an expression of you, but your property needs to look like a Pottery Barn catalog. Your wallpaper decisions may have expressed your individuality when you made them, but you are not an individual anymore, and no one wants to think about you. Stop expressing yourself. This place you live needs to look, in fact, like the total obliteration of “you,” because selling property is about someone else’s dreams of self-expression and taste.

Tanya and Roger rip up the carpet and consign to storage every object that means anything to the nice Southern lady. When the show ends, Tanya brightly informs us that prospective buyers are giving it “a second look.” In other words, it hasn’t sold. One imagines the dignified and bewildered owner imprisoned there still, looking around at the catalog pages that have become, not so much her home, but merely the place where she lives.

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine and is working on a book about consumer behavior.

Inspiration was flowing like the Verdugo Wash after a five-day rainstorm for Alex Dann.

“Where’s the zoo?” he asked, sizing up the table-size tableau in front of him. “Over there? Cool.”

The 7-year-old Tarzana boy was at a downtown Los Angeles art gallery Saturday, poring over an exhibit called “Five Models Afloat.” A moment later, he was participating in it.

He carefully studied the 4-foot foam-board square, which was divided into thirds by a bright blue plastic slash that depicted the Los Angeles River where it is joined by the Verdugo Wash at the Glendale-Los Angeles border.

One part of the square was covered by a miniature “mountain” molded out of window screen material to represent the Hollywood Hills. The other two, depicting flatland areas, were grids marked with a series of green swatches.

Dotting the areas around the swatches were tiny movable structures formed from small blocks of wood, Lego pieces, parts of toys and objects such as toothpaste caps.

Alex moved a wood-block figurine resembling a high-rise apartment house away from the edge of the river. He was asked if he had ever seen the real Los Angeles River and what it was like.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s a sewer,” he replied as his mother, Holly Dann, blanched.

“Well, it is,” Alex said, standing his ground.

The pair, along with father David Dann and 11-year-old sister Abby, had stopped at the gallery while shopping downtown.

The three-dimensional scene Alex was working on is a representation of one of five points along a 32-mile stretch of river for which officials have launched long-range plans to beautify the waterway and make it appear more natural.

Los Angeles officials, consultants and the Army Corps of Engineers spent two years conducting formal public workshops seeking ideas for the rehabilitation of what is now a mostly concrete-lined flood channel. Last month, they issued a draft report suggesting that a $2-billion makeover over the next 50 years could replace industrial land along the banks with park space. The steep concrete walls could be landscaped and rebuilt with step-like channelization.

There are professionally drawn maps and computergenerated renderings of what the future river could resemble. But it took transportation planner James Rojas to give it a threedimensional look.

Rojas, 47, works for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He is also co-owner of Gallery 727 in a storefront at 727 S. Spring St., where “Five Models Afloat” will end its monthlong run today with a final showing from noon to 4 p.m.

“As a planner, I go to a lot of meetings, and they’re always very boring because they’re flat and one-dimensional,” Rojas said. “A lot of people can’t read maps. By showing them three-dimensional models, it becomes a lot more engaging. You can figure out how the topography works. You can lean down and look at it and see how things relate to each other.”

The tiny blocks, figurines and other objects that gallery visitors use to create bridges, park plazas, town houses and shops are things that Rojas has collected since childhood.

Rojas said he planned the installation with children in mind, because the actual river renovation “will come in their lifetime, not ours.”

About 700 people have visited the exhibit, including design consultants working on the river plan and city officials. One of them was Councilman Ed Reyes, who heads the river master-planning committee.

“When I first heard about it, I thought it was unconventional, kind of strange. But when I got there, I saw people doing some creative things,” he said. “What struck me was how elaborate the little block and figurine structures were. People were really thinking about what they were doing.”

After watching awhile, Reyes tried some hands-on planning of his own.

“I felt kind of silly at first. But then I got to thinking: Where does the bridge go? Then I thought about decorating it with an angel, since the bridge was going to be near where the birthplace of the city was.

“Toward the end of my stay,” he said, “I saw a 6-year-old take over the whole board. And he did his own thing, and it didn’t look much different from what others were doing. He was laying down his vision as a young person.”

Reyes said professional planners welcome such creativity. Rojas agrees. So he has photographed various versions of the five river model boards as a permanent record of what visitors have suggested.

Some of the ideas are novel. One person used an acrylic toy lighthouse to mark the start of the river, where the Arroyo Calabasas and Bell Creek come together behind Canoga Park High School. Small plastic half-spheres illustrate “floating sticky balls” that another visitor placed at the juncture of the river and the Verdugo Wash “so people who fall in can stick to the balls and be saved.”

That’s the same area where Alex Dann installed his floating filter — made up of several rubber gaskets and what appeared to be a silver-colored tube connector he found in one of Rojas’ supply boxes.

“This is a machine that sucks up the trash and stuff from the water,” the boy explained, dropping bits of paper onto the faux river to illustrate how it would work.

Gallery 727 co-owner Adrian Rivas nodded knowingly.

“You’re an urban planner now,” he told Alex.