Book Review: <em>The Conundrum</em> by David Owen

Editor's Rating: A New Yorker writer catalogs the parodoxes of living green, including why driving a Prius may just make things worse

The Conundrum:
How Scientific Innovation,
Increased Efficiency, and
Good Intentions Can Make
Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse
By David Owen
Riverhead Books; 261 pp; $14

Nothing singes the psyche of an eco-conscious do-gooder quite like being rebuked by another eco-conscious do-gooder. In The Conundrum, which catalogs the hypocrisies and paradoxes of living green, the scolder is David Owen. His progressive bona fides are robust. In the 1970s, Owen moved with his new wife to Manhattan, a place he has described as a “utopian environmentalist community” because without a clothes dryer, a car, or even a lawn, their ecological footprint was minuscule. He writes frequently about the environment for the New Yorker, once arguing in its pages that an upside to the global economic crisis was that it decreased emissions. That he also writes for Golf Digest is confusing if not disqualifying.

The tough-love upbraiding in The Conundrum seems mostly directed at hybrid-driving, energy- efficient-lightbulb-screwing locavores convinced that such practices will set the world on a path to green salvation. Owen’s book brings deflating news: Most supposedly sustainable products and eco-living strategies are, he writes, “irrelevant or make the real problems worse.”

Owen’s logic is backed up by an economic principle known as the “rebound effect”: Advances in energy efficiency lower the cost of a given activity, which causes people to engage in that activity more, canceling out not only savings but also environmental benefits. Owen keeps a 1940s aluminum beer can on his desk. It weighs five times more than today’s can of Bud Light. Efficiency gains made beer cans cheaper to produce, transport, and dispose of. The cost of popping a brew declined so that more people can do it, using up more aluminum, not less.

It doesn’t take long for him to establish the Prius Fallacy: “a belief that switching to an ostensibly more efficient travel mode turns mobility itself into an environmental positive.” Owen cites statistics showing that as government officials have moved to increase automobile fuel efficiency, our gas consumption has gone up, not down. We simply drive more miles as a species. He also disses HOV lanes, traffic-control systems, and even smartphone apps for finding a parking spot as “counterproductive from an environmental point of view because they make drivers even happier with cars than they were already.”

The Conundrum is littered with other dilemmas. Air conditioners are more efficient and cheap; ergo, more homes are now air-conditioned. The more affordable lightbulbs get, the more they’re left on. Airplanes are more energy-efficient and faster than at any point in history, and therefore cheaper to fly longer distances. Owen is unafraid of questioning even that most sacred principle of guilt-free green living: eating local, organic food. Well-meaning consumers will drive minivans long distances to buy small quantities of organic food at urban farmers markets supplied by growers who make the schlep in trucks loaded at farms well beyond the suburbs. “If all the world’s groceries traveled from farm to fork in minivans, two bags at a time, we’d have exhausted many of the world’s resources long ago,” the author writes.

Owen’s short book is a contrarian page-turner and can be read in a few hours, making its ecological impact small. Even the most conscientious Whole Foods shopper will see his supposedly small footprint grow. Problems arise as Owen’s book progresses from description to prescription; the solutions offered, while ingenious, are unrealistic.

A stay-the-course, hope-for-the-best strategy is ludicrous to Owen. Instead, he’d like humans to live closer together and holds up New York City as a model. The metropolis is dense, living spaces are restricted, public transportation is (mostly) convenient, and car ownership is low. More important, he says, populations and governments should embrace strategies that effectively force reduced consumption of the planet’s natural resources. He would like us, metaphorically and perhaps actually, to drive Model T’s.

“If the only motor vehicles available today were 1920 Model T’s,” Owen writes, “how many miles do you think you’d drive each year, and how far do you think you’d live from work?” He wants to impose energy frugality by increasing fuel taxes and capping consumption. “Efficiency initiatives make no sense as an environmental strategy,” he writes, “unless they’re preceded—and more than negated—by measures that force major cuts in total energy use.”

Owen is right: The planet would be better off if we cut highway lanes and jacked up electricity rates. But he fails to answer the real conundrum: how to reverse humanity’s relentless pursuit of comfort.

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Book Review: 'Birdseye,' by Mark Kurlansky

Birdseye: The Adventures
of a Curious Man
By Mark Kurlansky
Doubleday; 272 pp; $25.95

Wherever he went, be it Montana, Peru, or remotest Newfoundland, Clarence Birdseye sampled the fare at hand. There were few limits to what he would eat—porcupine, the front half of a skunk, and “a lynx that had marinated for over a month in sherry and was then stewed and served with a sauce made from the marinade.” Although described in Mark Kurlansky’s new biography as a “nineteenth century man,” Birdseye was, in his tastes, surprisingly in sync with today’s ethos of locavorism and nose-to-tail eating. Delectably ironic, then, that his name is associated with the product that most symbolizes the homogeneity of the suburban dinner table: frozen peas.

The master of the food monograph (he’s the author of Cod and Salt, but not Salt Cod—at least, not yet) Kurlansky typically begins with a single natural resource and studies its broad impact on humankind. This book flips that model on its head by studying one extraordinary man and the effect of his innovations on a host of commodities.

Birdseye led a peripatetic early life, including stints at Amherst College, assessing the economic opportunities around coyote fur in New Mexico, and researching ticks in the Montana wilderness. He was seeking a calling, a way to marshal his curiosity in a sustained direction. As Birdseye himself put it, he “wanted to get into some field where I could apply scientific knowledge to an economic opportunity.” To Kurlansky, this mindset is a particularly American stripe of industriousness, and indeed Birdseye seems to have been as much entrepreneur as inventor.

In 1912 Birdseye ended up in Labrador—then, even more than now, a forbidding place to live—where he worked on a strategy for breeding foxes for their pelts. He had modest success in this endeavor, but it was there that he found the inspiration for his true life’s work. He was fastidious in his study of local eating habits; Labrador was a desperately poor place, beset by disease, and while its inhabitants had as much seal meat and cod as they could handle, vegetables in particular were scarce. After his wife joined him in 1916 and the two had a child, Birdseye envisioned making fresh-tasting food available in places it otherwise wouldn’t be—pineapple in Pennsylvania—and in seasons it didn’t grow—sweet corn in February. His instinct was that freezing was the answer.

Birdseye did not invent frozen food. It already existed, but it was abhorred for its poor taste and poorer texture. It was so bad that in New York State it was deemed unsuitable for prisoners. Yet up north in Labrador, Birdseye noticed, “The Inuit traditionally enjoyed high-quality frozen food. They fished in holes in the ice and pulled out a trout, and it instantly froze in the 30-below air. When they cooked it, it tasted like fresh fish. In fact, sometimes the Inuit would put the frozen fish in water and thaw it, and the fish would start swimming … still live.” Now there’s an advertising campaign.

Birdseye figured out that the size of the crystals formed in frozen food were the determining factor in its palatability upon thawing—the smaller the crystals, the better. And the faster the freeze, the smaller the crystals. This was an insight, though again not a new one: The first patent for freezing food was granted in 1862, and even fast-freezing had been known by 1915. Birdseye invented nearly nothing, per se. What he did was understand the freezing process and its uses holistically. As Birds-eye later put it, “I set out to develop a method which would permit the removal of inedible waste from perishable foods at production points, packing them in compact and convenient containers and distributing them to the housewife with the intrinsic freshness intact.”

After tweaking the process and securing funding—and staking his family’s entire bankroll—Birds-eye established a factory in Gloucester, Mass. He would start by freezing fish, abetted by the recently invented filleting machine. He named his new company General Seafood. (The automobile industry had its General Motors (GM), the power industry its General Electric (GE), and Birdseye had similarly scaled aspirations.) As Kurlansky points out, “He was not as interested in founding a company as in launching a whole new industry.”

Once he had perfected the freezing, Birdseye turned to marketing, shrewdly rebranding his food as “frosted.” He also faced the problem of infrastructure. Everything from shipping containers to refrigerated train cars to supplying mom-and-pop stores with suitable freezers had to be contended with, and it was in this area that many of Birdseye’s innovations came. General Seafood’s growing portfolio of patents showed such potential that in 1929 Post purchased the company for $23.5 million. Post eventually changed its name to General Foods, keeping Bird’s Eye as a frozen food brand.

Although he became a multimillionaire, Birds-eye continued to tinker until his death in 1956, securing patents for everything from light bulbs to a harpoon designed for tagging whales, but it was at the dinner table where he made his monumental impact. “Frozen peas,” Kurlansky writes, “became one of the most successful Bird’s Eye frosted foods because they were such a brilliant green.” Which may be part of the appeal. However, to British chef Fergus Henderson, the flavor of the peas is superior because they are frozen so quickly after harvesting. “A wise old chef once told me,” Henderson quipped, “Wait till peas are in season, then use frozen.”

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Washington Crosses the Delaware in Met’s Grand New Wing: Review

January 18, 2012, 10:06 AM EST By Lance Esplund

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a magnificent puzzle. The last piece of its current configuration, the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, has just been put in place.

The most direct way is up a small glass elevator -- which will surely have to work like a piston to accommodate crowds.

Once upstairs, however, the suite of 26 galleries is spacious. A minimalist interpretation of 19th-century Beaux Arts galleries, the arrangement is mostly sky-lit and includes high cove ceilings. Although it adds a modest 3,300 square feet, the galleries feel expansive. Their range of thematic spaces -- from monumental to intimate niches -- flows naturally.

The installation of almost 600 artworks from the 18th to the early 20th century provides long-range views of classics, such as Emanuel Leutze’s 21-foot-wide “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851) -- America’s response to grand-manner European history painting.

The Leutze work has just been restored, replete with a new hand-carved, gilded frame based on a recently discovered 1864 photograph. The frame is crowned by a commanding crest comprising weapons, an eagle, a stars-and-stripes shield and waving banners.

Trumpet Blasts

One of the most famous of U.S. artworks, the painting provides patriotic trumpet blasts and is the designated hallmark of the collection.

I was surprised to learn that Leutze’s “Washington” is also the most popular object in the museum. It beats out the Vermeers, Rembrandts and Van Goghs, El Greco’s “View of Toledo” and Bruegel’s “The Harvesters.”

For me, it’s when the drums aren’t beating and the flags aren’t waving, when the galleries feel less like boastful history lessons, that the artworks shine.

The great 19th-century U.S. landscape painters Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Edwin Church and Thomas Cole are represented here. Yet when their landscapes are compared to those by Cezanne, Claude, Corot and Poussin, the American pictures feel burdened by well-intended morality tales.

Fluid Study

Cole’s small study for the painting “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm -- The Oxbow” (1836) is more fluid and convincing than the larger, stiffer finished work.

You’ll find many crowd-pleasers by Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Charles Willson Peale and James McNeill Whistler in galleries devoted to American Impressionism; History, Landscape and National Identity; Portraiture in the Grand Manner; the West; and the Civil War Era. There’s also, of course, John Singer Sargent’s infamous “Madame X,” the wife of a banker. Poorly received at the Paris Salon of 1884, the portrait made the painter flee to London and sent the poor, odd- shaped woman into the vale of tears.

A room of works by John Singleton Copley includes the masterwork “Daniel Crommelin Verplanck” (1771), that strange little portrait of a squirrel with a seated child who is perched like a bird and has the knowing, if not predatory, countenance of a man.

The new American Wing Galleries’ most compelling works are often small, humble and restrained. They include furniture, silver and folk art, such as Ammi Phillips’s portrait painting “Mrs. Mayer and Daughter” (1835-40) and a beautiful grouping of hand-carved, 19th-century wildfowl decoys.

A sheet-metal, iron and gold-leaf weathervane of a bird (c. 1874), which once topped the barn of a New Jersey shooting retreat, is elegant and quirky.

Make Time

There are two little dark, moonlit masterpieces by Albert Pinkham Ryder in a corner. In the small Portraits in Miniature Gallery, you’ll find, among other gems, Emily Drayton Taylor’s coin-sized painting on ivory “Eye of Maria Miles Hayward” (c. 1930).

The new galleries are packed with big favorites. Allow yourself to venture off the beaten path, away from the grandstanding and into its nooks and crannies, and you will be rewarded by an astounding range of small treasures, made in America, newly discovered.

(Lance Esplund is U.S. art critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jim Ruane, Farah Nayeri.

To contact the writer on the story: Lance Esplund in New York at lesplund@gmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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Seattle Goes Green With Marine Toilets, Big Solar Hat: Review

January 11, 2012, 10:54 AM EST By James S. Russell

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- In Seattle, contractors have begun digging for an office building that will eventually wear what looks like a big cocked hat.

It’s a solar-panel array topping off the five-story home for the local Bullitt Foundation.

When it opens next winter, the Bullitt Center will also scrub its own water with the aid of composting toilets.

The new building reflects founder Dorothy Bullitt’s aspiration to turn the Pacific Northwest into a global model of environmental sustainability.

The foundation sources many of its components locally, and strives to eliminate toxins in building materials and ventilating air. Its self-imposed high standards have often been a challenge to the Miller Hull Partnership, the project’s Seattle architect.

These are all requirements of the Living Building Challenge, a program to improve health and minimize building energy use and waste.

Among other things, Miller Hull had to ask manufacturers to reformulate products and dig into the energy performance of desktop computers.

Then they had to figure out how to do all this affordably.

Airy Feel

On its small site, the Bullitt’s roof was the only place to put the solar panels needed to generate the building’s power.

Since Seattle’s ubiquitous clouds admit so little sunlight, Miller Hull partner Ron Rochon, working with PAE Consulting Engineers, had to keep squeezing energy out of the building design to match the panels’ output.

Geothermal wells will supply most of the heat. Offices will feel airy with high ceilings that allow much of the space to forgo electric lights in daytime. Windows will open to cool breezes during Seattle’s mild summers.

The team slashed the usual energy-wasting systems to such a degree that desktop computers dominated the building’s energy demand.

Even so, the building still used too much energy.

The architects and engineers identified slimmed servers and efficient laptops to reduce a standard computer’s consumption of 1,150 watts to just 250, about the same as two household bulbs.

They talked city officials into letting Bullitt expand the solar array by projecting the roof over the sidewalk, normally not permitted. That involved relocating power lines and persuading skeptical neighbors that the roof wasn’t too intrusive.

There were more hoops to jump through. The foundation hoped to harvest drinking water from the roof and avoid chlorinating it.

So far the Environmental Protection Agency has nixed that idea, though the designers are appealing its decision. To treat all the water used onsite, Rochon’s team found marine toilets that will deliver waste to a basement composting room. No one has ever done that, he said.

Well-meaning as they are, I do wonder if many of these measures are worth the effort. Solar -- for now anyway -- is a lost cause in such a dim climate, especially in a city largely driven by clean hydropower.

City Level

Water pollution needs to be tackled at a neighborhood or city scale, not within individual buildings.

Still, there’s a crazy-like-a-fox quality to the Bullitt effort. It has encouraged a German high-performance window-wall manufacturer to build a facility in nearby Everett. A waterproofing-compound manufacturer called Building Envelope Innovations has agreed to reformulate its product without phthalates, a class of chemical compounds that may harm reproductive health.

Seattle has established a 2030 District in and around its downtown to achieve carbon-neutrality by the year 2030.

With Congress hopelessly gridlocked about any energy legislation and Iran blustering as usual, Seattle and Bullitt are pointing the way to a possible future. For $30 million Bullitt won’t just get a handsome, healthy, zero-energy workplace, but one that incubates job growth.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. He is the author of “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Manuela Hoelterhoff, Daniel Billy.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

View the original article here

Seattle Goes Green With Marine Toilets, Big Solar Hat: Review

January 10, 2012, 7:45 PM EST By James S. Russell

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- In Seattle, contractors have begun digging for an office building that will eventually wear what looks like a big cocked hat.

It’s a solar-panel array topping off the five-story home for the local Bullitt Foundation.

When it opens next winter, the Bullitt Center will also scrub its own water with the aid of composting toilets.

The new building reflects founder Dorothy Bullitt’s aspiration to turn the Pacific Northwest into a global model of environmental sustainability.

The foundation sources many of its components locally, and strives to eliminate toxins in building materials and ventilating air. Its self-imposed high standards have often been a challenge to the Miller Hull Partnership, the project’s Seattle architect.

These are all requirements of the Living Building Challenge, a program to improve health and minimize building energy use and waste.

Among other things, Miller Hull had to ask manufacturers to reformulate products and dig into the energy performance of desktop computers.

Then they had to figure out how to do all this affordably.

Airy Feel

On its small site, the Bullitt’s roof was the only place to put the solar panels needed to generate the building’s power.

Since Seattle’s ubiquitous clouds admit so little sunlight, Miller Hull partner Ron Rochon, working with PAE Consulting Engineers, had to keep squeezing energy out of the building design to match the panels’ output.

Geothermal wells will supply most of the heat. Offices will feel airy with high ceilings that allow much of the space to forgo electric lights in daytime. Windows will open to cool breezes during Seattle’s mild summers.

The team slashed the usual energy-wasting systems to such a degree that desktop computers dominated the building’s energy demand.

Even so, the building still used too much energy.

The architects and engineers identified slimmed servers and efficient laptops to reduce a standard computer’s consumption of 1,150 watts to just 250, about the same as two household bulbs.

They talked city officials into letting Bullitt expand the solar array by projecting the roof over the sidewalk, normally not permitted. That involved relocating power lines and persuading skeptical neighbors that the roof wasn’t too intrusive.

There were more hoops to jump through. The foundation hoped to harvest drinking water from the roof and avoid chlorinating it.

So far the Environmental Protection Agency has nixed that idea, though the designers are appealing its decision. To treat all the water used onsite, Rochon’s team found marine toilets that will deliver waste to a basement composting room. No one has ever done that, he said.

Well-meaning as they are, I do wonder if many of these measures are worth the effort. Solar -- for now anyway -- is a lost cause in such a dim climate, especially in a city largely driven by clean hydropower.

City Level

Water pollution needs to be tackled at a neighborhood or city scale, not within individual buildings.

Still, there’s a crazy-like-a-fox quality to the Bullitt effort. It has encouraged a German high-performance window-wall manufacturer to build a facility in nearby Everett. A waterproofing-compound manufacturer called Building Envelope Innovations has agreed to reformulate its product without phthalates, a class of chemical compounds that may harm reproductive health.

Seattle has established a 2030 District in and around its downtown to achieve carbon-neutrality by the year 2030.

With Congress hopelessly gridlocked about any energy legislation and Iran blustering as usual, Seattle and Bullitt are pointing the way to a possible future. For $30 million Bullitt won’t just get a handsome, healthy, zero-energy workplace, but one that incubates job growth.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. He is the author of “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Manuela Hoelterhoff, Daniel Billy.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

View the original article here

Lavish Homes of Emir, Gold Digger Star in Paris Show: Review

January 04, 2012, 12:10 PM EST By Jorg von Uthmann

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- He married the daughter of a U.S. robber baron and, with her fortune, built the Palais Rose, the most sumptuous mansion in Belle Epoque Paris.

In 1906, Anna Gould divorced Boni de Castellane, her profligate and philandering husband, and in 1969, the Palais Rose was demolished to make room for a dull luxury block.

An exhibition at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris revives such bygone glories and invites you to explore a local specialty, the “hotel particulier.”

Under the monarchy, Parisians reserved the honorary title of “palais” to royal residences. Other mansions, even the most palatial, were modestly called “hotels particuliers” or private townhouses.

Unlike their Roman or Florentine peers, French aristocrats didn’t flaunt their wealth: Most hid their residences behind high walls. You had to be invited to discover the splendors inside.

Some mansions are now museums and open to the public, such as the Musee de Cluny, the Musee Carnavalet or the Musee Picasso. Most, though, have morphed into ministries or embassies and are off limits to tourists.

At the Cite de l’Architecture, a wing of the Palais de Chaillot, you can have a look behind the closed doors even if you don’t know anybody in the French administration or the corps diplomatique.

The first section recreates the ground floor of an archetypal hotel particulier with its traditional sequence of rooms -- the entrance hall, the antechamber, the salon, the dining room and the gallery.

Trendy Areas

After that introduction, you enter the historical part of the show which relates how the fashionable neighborhoods changed over time.

In the Middle Ages, a man of taste built his mansion near the Louvre. Under Louis XIII, the fashionable quartier moved to the Marais and the Ile Saint-Louis, under Louis XV to the Saint- Germain and Saint-Honore suburbs, and in the 19th century to the new neighborhood around Parc Monceau.

The changing styles are illustrated with maquettes, paintings, photographs and architectural drawings of outstanding specimens.

One of those, the Hotel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis, made headlines in recent years after the Rothschild family sold it to a brother of the emir of Qatar. His plans to modernize the venerable building sparked a storm of protest: The authorities were accused of sacrificing France’s national heritage to the whims of Oriental potentates.

After a venomous debate, a compromise looks to be in the works.

Great Cocotte

Another gem, the Hotel Beauharnais, was bought in 1818 by the King of Prussia and is now the residence of the German ambassador. Eugene de Beauharnais, son of Josephine who later married Napoleon, almost went bankrupt decorating his acquisition in the then fashionable Empire style.

It’s the most ravishing ensemble of that period in Paris.

The exhibition is discreet about the turbulent life of La Paiva, the great cocotte who built the only surviving hotel particulier on the Champs-Elysees.

Born Esther Lachmann in Moscow, the daughter of a Jewish weaver, she decided that she wasn’t made for a life in poverty and became the mistress of a series of rich men. One of these, a Marquis de Paiva, married her only to discover that his fortune couldn’t keep up with his wife’s lifestyle.

After inviting his creditors to an opulent last supper, the marquis shot himself. The mansion now belongs to the Travellers Club.

In niches, the show explores characteristic details of the hotel particulier: facades, doors, wall decorations, ceilings, gardens.

Boni de Castellane’s knowledge of those details and his exquisite taste helped him survive in style after his divorce: He became an antiques dealer, with mostly U.S. customers, and titled his memoirs “L’Art d’Etre Pauvre,” or “The Art of Being Poor.”

“L’Hotel Particulier: Une Ambition Parisienne” is at the Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine through Feb. 19. Information: www.citechaillot.fr.

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jim Ruane, Mark Beech.

To contact the writer on the story: Jorg von Uthmann in Paris at uthmann@wanadoo.fr.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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Abstract Painter Gets Concrete Bunker in Still Museum: Review

November 30, 2011, 3:35 AM EST By James S. Russell

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- I couldn’t stop looking at a 1944 painting labeled PH-235. A fissure of red appeared to crack open a heavily textured black field. I felt I could fall into that yawning, monumental canvas.

It is a landmark painting by the enigmatic Clyfford Still (1904-1980), whose work is celebrated in a new museum in Denver. Single-artist museums can embalm. This one astonishes.

Rising to fame in the 1950s with such lions of abstract expressionism as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, Still withdrew from the New York art world at the peak of his fame, taking almost all of his work with him.

The diminutive 29,000-square-foot Clyfford Still Museum, which opened Nov. 18, houses about 2,400 of the artist’s works. Until now, his enormous stature has rested on less than 10 percent of his output during six decades.

The best of Still’s abstractions look as inevitable as the heedless, randomly beautiful patterns of geology or flowing water. The boxy bunker designed by architect Brad Cloepfil bristles with ragged concrete fins, evoking Still’s intricate compositions.

That roughened exterior radiates an elegant gravitas. It forms a carapace that guards Still’s cerebral work from our jangled, attention-deficit lives.

Cloepfil, of the Portland, Oregon, firm Allied Works Architecture Inc., brings a Zen calm by framing the nine, squarish second-floor galleries in planes of concrete and painted drywall that alternately obscure and reveal, like Shoji screens. He mixes salon-style rooms with high galleries topped by a rippling scrim of concrete in which teardrop perforations delicately shower the space with shimmering daylight.

Galleries Breathe

Each room feels contained, so that you stop and look rather than glance and move on. The galleries still breathe because Cloepfil opened corners to diagonal vistas that gently tease you along.

I’ve never seen another museum that paces the art-viewing experience so well.

Dean Sobel, the Still Museum’s director, working with abstract expressionism expert David Anfam, presents a chronological survey of about 100 of the museum’s holdings.

His early work depicts beaten-down Depression-era farm workers he knew from his youth on the endless frozen plains of the American and Canadian West, where he worked odd jobs, studied art, and taught. In photos, Still’s own expression is inevitably stern, with a sweep of gray hair topping rimless engineer-style glasses.

Sobel sketches a transition toward abstraction, with detours to surrealism and cubism weirdly inflected by art deco, before Still finds his true voice in the 1940s.

Breakout Work

PH-235 (Still didn’t title works) hangs in an 18-foot-high gallery with other breakout abstract expressionist paintings. These would make him famous and influence contemporaries.

Here Cloepfil mixes the daylight showering from above with sidelight that’s filtered to a limpid wash by the louvers of an outside porch.

This is lighting so gorgeous you feel you could touch it. Cloepfil worked with Brian Stacy, a lighting designer at the New York City office of the engineering firm Arup.

Sobel and Anfam have hung many drawings and paintings never displayed before. Tiny explosions of bright colors erupt out of huge swaths of dark brown and blue. I saw a psychic battlefield in swirling, colliding vortices of paint.

Still sold little after he left New York City in 1961, disgusted by what he saw as the art world’s soul-killing machinations. He worked out of a small barn on a farm in rural Maryland and developed a weakness for Jaguar cars. He died in 1980.

Will and Sale

His will offered his art to the American city that would build a museum completely devoted to his work. Under then-Mayor John Hickenlooper (who is now Colorado’s governor), Denver took up the challenge. The museum raised $32 million privately and built the $15 million structure.

Earlier this month Sotheby’s sold four paintings that had been promised to the museum by Clyfford’s wife, Patricia, when she died in 2005. They were auctioned to boost the endowment and sold for $114.1 million.

While the museum did very well by the art market Still disdained, the lush proceeds can only encourage cash-strapped institutions to proffer their own crown jewels, museum ethics be damned.

Thanks to Cloepfil, Still’s work now has a home that suits his stormy majesty.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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Satyrs Pursue Nymphs in Paris Show on Life in Pompeii: Review

December 01, 2011, 5:03 AM EST By Jorg von Uthmann

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Bunga bunga wasn’t invented by Silvio Berlusconi. As the murals in Pompeii make clear, the ancient Romans knew a thing or two about debauchery.

Pompeii, the city that disappeared on Aug. 24, 79 A.D. under lava and volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius, is in a sad state. In November 2010, the collapse of the gymnasium for gladiators prompted the opposition to call a no-confidence vote, accusing Berlusconi’s government of chronically underfunding the preservation of Italy’s cultural heritage.

The government survived the motion by three votes. That was a harbinger of its eventual downfall a year later.

“Pompei: Un Art de Vivre,” a show at the Musee Maillol in Paris, seeks to give an impression of daily life in that wealthy town of 12,000-15,000 inhabitants before fate struck.

The exhibition’s leitmotif is the domus, the single- family home, as opposed to the insulae, the multistory apartment buildings that dominated imperial Rome.

These villas easily covered 800 or 900 square meters and were built around three central spaces -- the atrium with an opening in the roof; the tablinum, the main living room; and the peristylium, another court surrounded by columns.

The organizers say such a house would be far preferable to the living conditions of later generations. This is true as far as hygiene is concerned: The Romans wouldn’t have tolerated the squalor at the Sun King’s court in Versailles.

Bronze Bathtub

Although only a few houses had bathrooms (balnea) with running water, spending at least an hour at the public baths (thermae) was part of the daily routine.

The show includes a bronze bathtub, shells for cosmetics, bottles with ointments, mirrors and a strigil -- a little scythe used for scraping sweat and dirt from the skin. A wall text informs you that the dark-haired women from southern Italy liked to have their hair dyed blonde.

To profit from the heat of the oven, the bathroom was adjacent to the kitchen. On display, along with kitchen utensils, are glasses, cups and silver or bronze flatware used for the cena, the main meal taken in the afternoon.

Some of these utensils are quite elaborate, such as a decanter in the form of a female head.

A mural depicting the Greek wine god Dionysos confirms our suspicion that the Romans weren’t teetotalers.

However, they always mixed their wine with water. Those who didn’t were considered alcoholics.

Satyrs and Nymphs

Sex was omnipresent. Before Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the Romans had a laid-back attitude to extramarital or homosexual affairs.

The walls in Pompeii abound with satyrs pursuing nymphs and other erotic scenes, some displaying an amazing degree of copulatory acrobatics.

In many homes, a proudly erect phallus in marble or bronze occupied a prominent place as a symbol of health and as a protector against evil.

Contorted bodies and a dog desperately pulling at its chain -- reconstructed by pouring gypsum plaster into the hollows left in the ash -- remind you of the fateful moment when life in Pompeii came to a sudden end.

“Pompeii: Un Art de Vivre” is at the Musee Maillol, Paris, through Feb. 12, 2012. Information: www.museemaillol.com.

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jim Ruane, Farah Nayeri.

To contact the writer on the story: Jorg von Uthmann in Paris at uthmann@wanadoo.fr.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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