Unity Temple, Oak Park, Ill., 1904. (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives/Avery/MoMA)

For Frank Lloyd Wright acolytes, appreciating the architect's masterpieces has long involved pilgrimages to far-flung locations. There's always the Guggenheim, of course, but more importantly, there's Falling Water, the Robie House, Taliesin and Taliesin West. Until recently, even looking at the architect's papers involved a journey to the latter two locations, in Spring Green, Wis., and Scottsdale, Ariz.

But now Wright's papers, which have been stored at the two Taliesins since his death in 1959, are moving to New York, in what The New York Times terms an unusual joint partnership between Columbia University's Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and the Museum of Modern Art.

The collection includes 23,000 architectural drawings, 44,000 photographs, more than 40 large-scale models, manuscripts and copious correspondence. Basically, Avery gets the architect's papers—which will be available for public viewing after the library completes the acquisitions process—and MoMA gets the models.

Best of all, besides the considerable costs of moving, preserving and storing the collection,  Columbia and MoMA get the collection for free. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will continue to monitor the collection, but New York will be its permanent home.

“It’s just astounding as primary source material,” Avery director Carole Ann Fabian told The Times. “I keep thinking of it as a national treasure.”

Meanwhile, the museum gushed in its statement that "At MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright’s work will be in conversation with great modern artists and architects such as Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier." Of course, Wright either is or isn't in conversations with other great modern artists and architects wherever his models and drawings are stored, but we suppose that conversation will be easier to hear at MoMA?

So when can we see these treasures? Wright's papers will be available for viewing at Avery around the end of next year; as for his models and mock-ups, they'll only be coming out for special exhibits and displays. In the meantime, the Architect's Newspaper provides a nice sneak peek of what we can expect to see with a slideshow and video.

kvelsey@observer.com

The museum had proposed marring its singular Frank Lloyd Wright building by adding a hot dog stand to the entryway of the structure. The argument was that it was more sightly than the hot dog vendor who has been parking himself out front for years. The museum even hired top-notch architect Andre Kikoski to design the thing, he of the James Beard Award-winning Wright restaurant that recently replaced the old cafeteria.

Kikoski designed a cat eye-shaped structure tucked under the museum's canopy, which the commission voted down 9-0 yesterday. The Architect's Newspaper was on the scene:

“While I admire the design and find the material selection interesting,” said Fred Bland, a commissioner and principal at Beyer Blinder Belle, “at no level can I accept the design. The quality of the museum and particularly the cantilevered entrance would be violated.” Chairman Robert Tierney concurred: “All the standards by which we judge applications are not met in this proposal.”

It is not as though the commission was being unfair, as it oversaw the massive expansion of the museum in 1992 and its more recent top-down renovation, which even encompassed such niggling details as the proper shade of paint Wright originally intended (answer: Tnemec BF72 Platinum). Even were the museum to put a Shake Shack inside, it is impossible to see how such an aggressive addition could ever be deamed acceptable.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

Mr. Piano’s past projects include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and parts of the Potsdamer Platz reconstruction in Berlin. His current endeavors promise to leave a significant mark in New York City: In addition to the Morgan, Mr. Piano is working on the new headquarters for The Times, plus expansions of the Whitney Museum and Columbia University.

So why curse the ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright? Because he’s to blame for the Guggenheim Museum. Wright’s famous rotunda is the sore thumb of cultural institutions. With his design, he made an emphatic point but set a confused precedent: Architectural independence trumps the true purpose of a museum—providing a safe haven for displaying and contemplating art. For the sake of spectacle, Wright pulled the rug out from under art. Something similar is afoot at the Morgan.

Though it’s not as egregious. At the dedication, Mr. Piano spoke of his wish to honor the original Morgan so that the “new doesn’t aggress the old.” He spoke, too, of creating a meditative space within the “good chaos” of New York City. These are exemplary goals; Mr. Piano is clearly an architect of acute sensitivity. Yet proposition and practice are two different things.

Mr. Piano’s contributions to the $106 million renovation include an education center, a concert hall, a reinforced vault for the museum’s holdings, an entryway and (what did you expect?) additional space for eating and shopping. The results are infinitely preferable to, say, the futuristic travesty that’s now the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum, or the shopping-mall brutalism of MoMA. It’s a blessing that Mr. Piano’s achievement is as streamlined and assured as it is.

The centerpiece is the entryway, relocated to Madison Avenue. A sun-drenched, three-story atrium now connects the existing Morgan villas with the Victorian brownstone on 37th Street. It’s to Mr. Piano’s credit that the addition’s spare industrial elegance—with its soaring banks of windows, blocky landings, right angles and glass elevator—works as well as it does. A modernist Morgan is less of an oxymoron than you might think.

All the same, it’s worth recalling that the library is there to highlight an astonishing collection of illuminated manuscripts, Old Master drawings and printed books—among many other riches. How well has Mr. Piano served the museum’s primary mission?

New Yorkers used to enter the Morgan through a smallish, stolidly proportioned doorway fronting 36th Street. The vestibule may have been clunky and stuffy, but it heralded a transition from the hurly-burly of city life into a realm of intimate, contemplative experience. No more. Mr. Piano’s atrium is mainly interested in herding the crowds and then wowing them. It’s a noisy public arena wedged inside an institution renowned for quiet pleasures.

As far as holding areas go, the atrium is more pleasant than most, yet it fails to elaborate upon or accentuate the nature of the Morgan itself. The addition is too busy celebrating its own fine self. The careless placement of a little gallery devoted to medieval artifacts off to the side is an insult to the glories contained within. (The coatroom has more presence.) In a weird way, the Morgan is now reminiscent of Dia: Beacon. In both cases, architecture justifies the expedition and art is along for the ride.

The original character of the Morgan’s galleries—or most of them anyway—has been retained, though one still has to wonder if the exhibition space has been doubled (as is claimed in a press release). “Where the hell’s the art?” one well-heeled visitor asked. I couldn’t help but empathize with his exasperation. There’s a nagging sense of misplaced priorities. The Morgan feels smaller for having been made bigger.

Judging from the overstuffed installation, the curators must have come to the same conclusion. One shouldn’t complain too much. A certain amount of showboating was called for, given the grand reopening. The museum’s holdings, after all, are almost relentlessly top-notch: drawings by Dürer, Da Vinci, Carracci, Goya, Ingres and an atypically tender Picasso; a fascinating array of tarot cards; paintings by Memling and the workshop of Bellini; the tightly wound script of the Brontë siblings and the working lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” to name just a few treasures.

Criticisms and plaudits for Mr. Piano’s efforts will be modified as time tempers the novelty of the revamped Morgan. Repeat visits are called for. But as things stand, the overhaul amounts to much ado about, if not nothing, then less than one might have expected. The ultimate effect of the expansion is distancing and disheartening, as if the rare and exquisite items under the care of the museum were an afterthought rather than its raison d’être. Art can withstand almost any affront. Who could have guessed that the Morgan Library would be one of them?

The Morgan Library is located at 225 Madison Avenue between 36th and 37th streets.

Ms. Huxtable, who is now the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal and who essentially invented the field of architecture criticism for a general audience, isn’t looking for extra opportunities to impress others with what she knows about the art of building. At 84, she delivers a takedown as well as anybody, but she’s more selective in her targets. She does fewer of them, for one, and doesn’t feel compelled to save every good building and tear down all the bad ones. “Often, I would do things because I thought I should do them, out of a sense of responsibility,” she said. “Now my philosophy is, ‘Look, you young people, it’s your responsibility. I’m going to do what I want to do.’“

In 1968, Ms. Huxtable—only five years into her official tenure as architecture critic for The New York Times—was already so well-known for her sharp tongue that The New Yorker ran a cartoon, by Alan Dunn, showing two construction workers in hard hats with the skeleton of a new building going up behind them. One of them, reading the newspaper, says to the other of the unfinished building, “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it.” Punch Sulzberger, the Times publisher, bought the original cartoon and gave it to Ms. Huxtable. A friend stitched the quote on a needlepoint cushion that the critic keeps on the sofa of her study.

The study is a compact room for a compact person, with books crawling up to the ceiling, an old-fashioned rug, and a pen-and-ink drawing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., perched on a credenza. Ms. Huxtable herself, attired in a black suit and with a crown of white hair, is much friendlier in person than in print, but just as frank. Her large penthouse apartment sprawls out behind her and, at first glance, appears unexceptional, as if its inhabitant has more on her mind than her most immediate surroundings. That patrician-populist perspective leads her to upbraid the star-chitects who have invaded New York recently, concentrating on expensive condos rather than on civic projects or affordable housing. “And Richard Meier’s buildings—to tell you the truth, if I had the money, I wouldn’t want to live there.”

These days, Ms. Huxtable is steamed with what she has, in a way, wrought herself. She was at the forefront of the historic-preservation movement—she began writing at a time when chunks of New York were being torn down wholesale—but now she thinks that it has gone bonkers. Exhibit A is 2 Columbus Circle, recently the subject of a splashy preservation attempt by such luminaries as Robert A.M. Stern and Tom Wolfe. Its current owner, the Museum of Arts and Design, is now cutting windows into the windowless concrete façade designed by Edward Durrell Stone. Ms. Huxtable panned the building when it opened in 1964, and she panned it again two years ago in The Journal. It is, she said, an example of the city’s landmarking instinct devolving into “chaos.”

“When it opened as the Huntington Hartford Museum,” Ms. Huxtable said, “I thought it was one of Ed Stone’s very poor buildings, when he became very commercial and was giving a screen formula to any client. I reviewed it and said it was a ‘die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,’ and it stuck. It’s now simply referred to everywhere as ‘the lollipop building.’ I also knew Ed Stone—who became Edward Durrell Stone— and I knew his work, and people who were there at the same time agreed. But today they don’t listen. I don’t think they listen in any field.”

On the other hand, the preservation process didn’t work at all for the Austin Nichols & Co. warehouse building on the Williamsburg waterfront. Earlier this fall, the City Council overturned the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision to protect the 1915 structure, with the local Councilman, David Yassky, calling it “a nondescript white box of a building.”

Now, now, Mr. Yassky.

“Of course it should be landmarked. It’s by Cass Gilbert, one of our great architects,” Ms. Huxtable said. “You have people who absolutely know nothing making outrageous statements about the architectural value of the building.”

The City Council even overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto of the Austin Nichols decision, but the fact he got involved in an architectural fight—and took Ms. Huxtable’s side—has redeemed him in her eyes after his futile attempt to put a football stadium on the West Side. “I think it shows he is not afraid of doing something. I think he has more of a sense of what’s good for the city than other people do.”

Her commitment to The Wall Street Journal is light enough—contractually, just six pieces a year—that she can pick and choose among the big topics about which she feels people must listen. Lately, she has focused on what she has called the “betrayal” of architect Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for rebuilding Ground Zero, of which she was a big fan. First there was developer Larry Silverstein’s insistence that he get to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space in order to receive his full insurance payments. Then there was the architectural do-over of the Freedom Tower by David Childs, “an awkwardly torqued hybrid” that “speaks more of ego and arrogance than of art.” And finally, she wrote, the success of a small, vocal group of victims’ relatives in pushing aside cultural institutions proves that “the entitlements of loss and grief are the third rail of the rebuilding effort.”

Her insistence on which topics must be discussed is the hallmark of her career. Forty-six years ago, Ms. Huxtable got her first assignments by walking into New York Times Sunday editor Lester Markel’s office and telling him everything he was missing.

“They would simply print the puff pieces,” she said, “and they would show architects’ renderings, and I would get so upset. I would say, ‘That terrible thing?!’ I do believe in entitlement. I do believe we all are consumers of architecture, and that we are all entitled to something good, and that this garbage was being foisted on us by developers. I came out from the belief that architecture is a social art. It’s a great art, but it’s a social art. It has to work. It has to serve people.”

Shortly thereafter, The Times created a new job for her: architecture critic, the first one at a daily newspaper in this country. She became an influential voice for the ordinary man in an age of organization men, and an advocate for architecture over real-estate development. In 1970, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Some of what Ms. Huxtable would learn about buildings in practice—she studied architectural history at Hunter College and was, from 1946 to 1950, an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art—came from her husband, L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer she had met at the end of college, during a chance encounter at Bloomingdale’s. She was working at a special sale of modernist furniture staged in conjunction with a show of new designs at MoMA. (“He was furnishing his bachelor apartment and I sold him a piece of furniture, and he got me!”) Later, when he began designing the conference rooms at the United Nations building, he took her along to see the progress.

When she started at The Times, Ms. Huxtable was terrified, and she balked at Clifton Daniel’s offer to take her on full-time as the newspaper’s first-ever architecture critic—until he said that he would hire someone else if she refused. One would never expect, reading her elegant, confident prose or hearing her speak, that Ms. Huxtable ever felt that she didn’t know what she was doing. (“I never handed in a piece that had a correction on it, because I didn’t want anybody else to make a correction.”) She took on cause after cause, and whether it was because of her or her megaphone or the broader preservation movement, at least some of those buildings got saved.

Ms. Huxtable left The Times in 1982, aided by a MacArthur Fellowship that permitted her to work on books full-time. (She is now fishing for a new project.) Her husband died in 1989, and she now spends half of the year on the north shore of Massachusetts, near cousins and other relatives from her mother’s side of the family.

Age has been on her mind lately. Last year, she finished a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series in which she took the architect—one of her favorites—to task for lying about his birth date, making himself appear two years younger than he actually was. It was, she wrote, “the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men.”

Ms. Huxtable would never do that—“My age is on the record, and I know perfectly well that no one will ever write anything about me without giving it”—but the peace she has made with the age question is a prickly, uneasy one. She is bothered by the idea that she will be treated “as some sort of freak show,” she said.

“I often get these letters that say, ‘I want to do what you do,’ this kind of business, and I try to be tolerant, because I never set out to do this. I set out to learn as much about architecture as I could,” she said. “In other words, you’ve got to have a sense of purpose and interest in something, and that will always lead you somewhere.”

Does anyone remember when the subways were able to run even in the event of rain? Could it possibly be, like the Jake Gyllenhaal movie warned us, that the weather is getting worse, or are we just remembering the past through rose-tinted goggles, like when a latte cost less than $4, we didn’t have meaningless words like “metrosexual,” straight guys didn’t get more pedicures than their girlfriends, no one talked about putting things in their Netflix queue, and your average 24-year-old socialite could read at least at the fourth-grade level? Sigh. Tonight, if you are the kind of person who entertains fantasies about pen lights and pretension, head to New York University for the “So You Wanna Be a Critic” lecture. Various New York movie critics such as New York magazine’s Peter Rainer, Entertainment Weekly ’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, Newsday ’s Linda Winer and, sadly, The New Yorker ’s not Anthony ( Hello, ladies!) Lane but David Denby. “The idea is to hear how people got to where they are now, the paths they took and what advice they’d give out to aspiring critics,” said the event’s rep. Good luck with that! Down in Battery Park City, another museum we’d never heard of, the Skyscraper Museum, starts a four-month run of a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit. We love the word “skyscraper” ’cause it’s one of those fun words that means what it is (like “scarecrow”), but apparently Mr. Wright was fascinated by the form itself. And by the way, if you think we are ever— ever —going up into one of the tall buildings they’re planning to build at Ground Zero, you are cray-zee. Nuts. Insane. Bonkers. Bats in the belfry. O.K.? [“So You Wanna Be a Critic,” Kimmel Center, Silver Board Room No. 914, 60 Washington Square South, 6:30 to 8 p.m., www.cencom.org; Frank Lloyd Wright: The Vertical Dimension, the Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Place, noon to 6 p.m., www.skyscraper.org.]

Thursday 7th

Ask yourself how often the opportunity comes along to breathe the very same air as a real-life knight (seeing Elton John at Da Silvano doesn’t count). Sir Harold Evans, writer and historian (and who very sweetly does not insist on being referred to as “Sir”), celebrates the launch of his new book, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. The book, which is a history of innovation in the United States told through the inventors and entrepreneurs—and the basis of a four-part series of the same name that will air on PBS in November—was the end product of five years of research. “As I got into this thing, it was like Aladdin going into his cave and rubbing his lamp,” said Mr. Evans. “As I kept rubbing this lamp, I was astonished at the riches I kept discovering.” Mr. Evans is so enthusiastic about his subject that he apparently drove his wife (somebody by the name of Tina Brown) and anyone else within earshot nuts: “I found myself starting a lot of conversations with, ‘Did you know that Edison did so-and-so?’” he said. Tonight he sits down with Oscar de la Renta (innovator of flounce), Fred Smith (innovator of FedEx), Martin Scorsese (innovator of film), Ted Turner (innovator of, among other things, the new Jane Fonda) and Mark Gumz (innovator of digital-camera-making Olympus, but more importantly the corporate sponsor of the whole shebang), for a conversation about—what else?—innovation and the American dream. Meanwhile, hard to believe that John Lennon would have turned 64 years old this Saturday, thus reaching the once far-flung age he wondered about in “When I’m 64.” In honor of his birthday, Yoko Ono and Bag One Arts will be showing over 100 pieces of artwork drawn by Lennon tonight through Sunday. Even further south of Houston, more artists wondering if we’ll still need them—or, more importantly, if we’ll still feed them—will be at the 2004 Starving Artists Ball held on Norfolk (natch) Street. Michael Imperioli, a.k.a. Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, whose credit as writer on any episode makes us throw spoons at the television, is the keynote speaker at the event, which raises grant money for an up-and-coming New York City–based artist. The invitation says attire is “downtownformal” —which can only mean a glittery H&M halter top over a pair of $200 Roganjeans and$400 Louboutin heels (total cost of your outfit: $615) and lots of facial hair and untucked shirts on the boys. Tuck ’em in, fellas—we’re at war! [They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators discussion, the Broadhurst Theater, 235 West 44th Street, 6:30 p.m., 917-250-4232; “When I’m 64,” 102 Wooster Street, 5 to 9 p.m., 212-595-5537; 2004 Starving Artists Ball, the Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street at Houston, 8 p.m.; 212-279-4200.]

Friday 8th

Queer Guy, Punk Guy: Carson Kressley, the flaxen-locked fashion guy from Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, perhaps inevitably has written a fashion book, Off the Cuff: The Essential Style Guide for Men and the Women Who Love Them. Chapter titles include “The Devil Wears Pleated Khakis” and tries to put male fashion into straight-man-friendly language (page 71: “Cashmere is the flat-screen TV of yarns. It’s the Super Bowl of sweaters”)—and the pages even sort of smell good. We found Mr. Kressley in his apartment in Chelsea (“the gay heartland,” he said), on a break from his book tour. “Well, what I really wanted to do was rescue tea-cup Yorkies, but I found out there weren’t any available, so I decided to do this instead,” said Mr. Kressley. Mr. Kressley agreed with us that “metrosexual” was a term that had to be stopped ( “Doesn’t it just sound like having sex on a train?”) and considered an alternative phrase. “What about just calling them ‘ Men who highlight their hair but still sleep with women ’” he offered. For those who would like to get up close to the wit of Mr. Kressley, he’ll be discussing his book today at the Wall Street Borders. Speaking of New Yorkers with highlighted hair, local bands such as Blondie, Sonic Youth and the shaggy-haired Strokes pay tribute tonight to punk legend Johnny Ramone, who passed away from prostate cancer on Sept. 15 (and who would have turned 56 today), with a concert to benefiting the Cedars Sinai Cancer Research Center and the Lymphoma Cancer Research Foundation. “The event was Johnny’s idea,” said Arturo Vega, the Ramones’ longtime creative director and event organizer. “We planned it five months ago. Even though Johnny’s health was getting more and more fragile, he always insisted that the event go on as planned. He said he didn’t want to disappoint the fans, even in the event of his own death.” [Carson Kressley’s Off the Cuff: The Essential Style Guide for Men and the Women Who Love Them talk and signing, Borders, 100 Broadway, 1 p.m., www.carsonkressley.com; “Be Well: The Ramones Beat on Cancer” concert, Spirit Nightclub, 530 West 27th Street, 6 p.m. 212-268-9477.]

Saturday 9th

If you woke up wanting a little more autumn in your diet —and who wouldn’t?—try to get past all the Scandinavian tourists (we thought the rest of the world hated us—what gives?) and head over to the 25th annual “Crafts on Columbus,” now in its second of a three-weekend run, between the American Museum of Natural History and the Rose Center for Earth and Space. The press release brags that artisans will set up booths on the sidewalk” and showcase jewelry, candles, clocks and something about “functional household furnishings.” Next! If you’re really in the mood to see what we’re guessing can only be a freak show of epic proportions, dare to enter Madison Square Garden today for the C.F.A./IAMS Cat Show New York, where 325 “competitive felines” (me- ow!) compete for best-in-show honors. There is a cat supermarket, an Ask the Vet center, a showcase of different breeds and even (meep) something about a cat-cloning exhibition. Look, we love cats, but this really does sound like an awful lot of pussy (sorry).

[Autumn Crafts on Columbus, Columbus Avenue between 77th and 81st streets, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., 212-866-2239; C.F.A./IAMS Cat Show New York, Madison Square Garden, Seventh Avenue between 31st and 34th streets, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., 877-232-7469.]

Sunday 10th

If you’re one of those people who dream of fame and riches, but you don’t have a trust fund to start designing handbags or the option to star in a reality show, head down to the Virgin Megastore for a “Mega-Search” for “Mega-Stars” ( sigh) today. The Web site says, “For those who have that special something—exceptional talent, looks or star-quality” (the “or” is an important distinction, people). At the Union Square store location, participants will be interviewed by a “top talent-scout/agent,” and the chosen few will be offered a contract on the spot. This must be the American dream that Sir Harry was referring to! If reading the above made you feel as if you need to get back into nature tout suite, get up to beautiful Wave Hill for a wildlife walk with naturalist (not to be confused with nudist) Gabriel Willow, who will show you “songbirds migrating from their northern breeding grounds to their southern wintering grounds.”

[Virgin Megastore’s Mega-Search, Virgin Megastore, 14th Street and Broadway, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., www.searchformegastars.com; Wildlife Walk, Wave Hill, 249th Street and Independence Avenue, 8:30 a.m., www.wavehill.org.]

Monday 11th

Well, it’s Columbus Day, which is a controversial holiday for some and another opportunity to stick you with a destination wedding for others. If you’re in town, we’re sure there’s a parade somewhere with some Sopranos

cast members about. Or go in the opposite direction and try to crash a breakfast with Mikhail Gorbachev here to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Green Cross International, an environmental organization that he established. Or focus on our own national leaders through something warm and fuzzy—their pets! Mo Rocca, former Daily Show correspondent and current talking head on various VH1 shows, has written All The President’s Pets: The Story of One Reporter Who Refused to Roll Over, and will be at the Union Square Barnes & Noble today. “It’s a thriller starring me and Helen Thomas,” deadpanned Mr. Rocca of his intense and comprehensive research on Presidential pets and their influence on the country. O.K.! Now we’ve always said that the one thing this city doesn’t have nearly enough of are yoga studios ( sigh) and stringy yoga teachers (essentially former aerobics teachers with incense), so we’re pleased that a glamorous new studio is opening, run by the clearly well-connected Sadie Nardini and Eliazabeth Rossa (close friend of the ubiquitous and disturbingly tall nightclub hostess Amy Sacco —did her movie deal with Graydon come through yet?). Their fancy friends will be showing up to celebrate tonight in Tribeca, and rumored to show are the aforementioned Ms. Sacco, the apparently flexible (judging from Showgirls)

Gina Gershon, Flamingo Kid Matt Dillon, Tribeca lurker Fisher (what the hell does he do all day?) Stevens and Law & Order ’s Jesse Martin. Crash strategy: wear a poncho (which are making a distressing comeback). Better still: stay home and scrub your sticky mat! [Mikhail Gorbachev Green Cross International breakfast, Hotel Plaza Athénée, 37 East 64th Street, 9 a.m., by invitation only; All the President’s Pets: The Story of One Reporter Who Refused to Roll Over reading, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 7 p.m., www.allthepresidentspets.com; Shri Yoga party, 443 Greenwich Street, 7 to 10 p.m., by invitation only.]

Tuesday 12th

The British are coming! It seems it’s time again to pretend like this men-wearing-kilts thing will actually make it to the city streets and not just be associated with Prince Charles or Axl Rose. Today Howie Nicholsby, designer of 21st Century Kilts, will be holding fittings at the Roosevelt Hotel for custom-made kilts in “funky slashed leather and denim.” Yikes. Speaking of the British Isles, Christie’s, that great old bastion of auctioning and impressive invitations, will have a champagne reception for the British Memorial Garden Trust this evening, with “an illustrated talk” by the Earl of Lichfield. The real draw appears to be the preview of an upcoming auction, “Important English Furniture” (whose title inexplicably cracks us up). Crash strategy: don’t bathe for three days.

[21st Century Kilts fittings, Roosevelt Hotel, Madison at 45th Street, Fifth Avenue Suite, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., 678-571-4746; the British Memorial Garden Trust champagne reception, Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, 6 to 9 p.m., 212-682-7945.]

Wednesday 13th

Well, here we are again, and we’ve discovered a new wrinkle in our America’s Next Top Model addiction. The great evil genius that is Disney has put its new talked-about show, Lost (which, for the first time, we literally saw discussed around a water cooler) against the UPN little reality show that could. What to do? Pray you can figure out the VCR. [America’s Next Top Model, UPN, 8 p.m.; Lost, ABC, 8 p.m.]

The title of the show at the Guggenheim- Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things -is drawn from one of his statements, which in its entirety reads: "They are imbeciles who call my work abstract; that which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior form but the idea, the essence of things." Be that as it may, no sculptor of the modern era devoted a greater degree of concentration to perfecting the exterior form of his work than Brancusi. To the cutting, the carving, the polishing and the stacking of his forms-and to his own photographs of those forms-he brought a connoisseur's eye for the physical properties of his chosen materials: wood, stone and metal. What Brancusi called "the idea" was designed to exalt those properties and transform them into a spiritual or philosophical experience.

In that process of transformation, his sculpture remained firmly tethered to the realm of representation, as the titles of his work unequivocally attest. Yet, despite the disavowals, there is an emphatic will to abstraction, or what might better be described as purification, to be seen in Brancusi's sculpture, and it's in the tension that obtains between the polarities of representation and abstraction (or purification) that we experience the poetic paradox that governs every aspect of his sculptural imagination-a paradox that the artist himself assiduously cultivated: The harder he labored at perfecting the material appeal of his sculpture, the more he talked about ideas and essences. Thus, while the sculpture is representational, all of Brancusi's statements about it underscore its spiritual qualities.

At the Guggenheim, however, the subtleties of this paradox are shamelessly obscured by the juxtaposition of another exhibition- Mondrian to Ryman: The Abstract Impulse -that's supposed to have a direct connection with the Brancusi sculptures scattered along the museum's ramp. It's hard to imagine a body of modernist art more at odds with both the spirit and the substance of Brancusi's sculpture than that of the Minimalist artists represented in the Abstract Impulse show. While the latter vigorously eschew all references to representation, Brancusi's sculpture tenderly embraces them. Minimalism, moreover, is governed by the imperatives of geometric form and straight-edged construction, both of which are entirely foreign to Brancusi's sensibility. Yet the Guggenheim insists on identifying Brancusi as a source of 20th-century Minimalism, which is pure abstraction. You have to wonder if the museum's curators understand what Brancusi meant when he spoke of "imbeciles."

What both of these exhibitions at the Guggenheim really amount to is little more than yet another repackaging of the museum's permanent collection under a couple of catchpenny titles. Some of us have seen these Brancusi sculptures many, many times in the past, and they gain nothing from their installation in the museum's Frank Lloyd Wright ramp, which is itself a proto-sculptural conception designed to dominate whatever it's assigned to contain. Wright was famously contemptuous of all modern painting and sculpture, and he expressed his contempt by designing the kind of exhibition space that would signify his low opinion of both. This is not the first time that Brancusi has been made to serve as a casualty of Wright's self-aggrandizing ideas, and it's unlikely to be the last.

For those of us who recall the first Brancusi exhibition organized at the old, pre-Wright Guggenheim by the late James Johnson Sweeney, it's doubly sad to witness the indifferent treatment of this great artist by the current custodians of the museum. Among his many other talents, Sweeney was a genius at museum installation as well as a keen connoisseur of sculpture, and these are precisely the gifts that are missing in the presentation of Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things , which remains in its compromised state at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through Sept. 19.

But Sidewalk Isn't for Sale

The Guggenheim Museum may be in the middle of some serious belt-tightening, but that doesn't mean they've gone so far as to rent out ad space on their landmark Frank Lloyd Wright façade or-more to the point-on the sidewalk in front of the building. At least they haven't resorted to such measures yet, and certainly not pro bono, as a museum security officer explained to the cops around 4:15 a.m. on Dec. 31.

It was at that desolate hour of the morning that the police responded to the location, where they were informed that at approximately 3:40 a.m. the guard had discovered the words "KOPACH FILMS" painted in large white letters on the ground in front of the museum's entrance.

Perhaps the graffiti referred-in some sort of ironic, existential way-to a guy by the name of Kopach and his celluloid obsession. Or perhaps the mystery filmmaker had been using the sidewalk as a backdrop on which to run the credits of an independent film. The answer may never be known, since the perp had left the scene by the time the guard spotted the vandalism.

However, the auteur did leave some rather solid evidence behind: On the ground beside the enigmatic words was a paint tray, a roller and a can containing a paint of the same hue as that used to deface the sidewalk.

An NYPD evidence collection team arrived and-for want of any suspect-took the paint, can, tray and roller into custody.

Heavy Reading

One of the problems confronted by book thieves-a problem that's not faced by shoplifters of goods that can rather easily be concealed on one's person, say jewelry or even clothing-is where to hide the merchandise while you make your escape.

Granted, it's not especially hard to slip a book into a commodious pocket. Perhaps even two or three titles can be hidden without too much effort, assuming, of course, that they're not coffee-table books. But once you start filching five, 10, 15 or-in the case of a perp who was apprehended at the Barnes & Noble at 240 East 86th Street on Dec. 11-17 books, you're sort of asking for it.

Unsurprisingly, the suspect was observed by not one but three separate store detectives, all of whom apparently introduced themselves as he attempted to depart without paying. The literature, valued at $400, was confiscated and the thief, a 43-year-old male, was held until the police arrived and took over.

No Free Parking

It appears that the 31-year-old Brooklyn resident the cops arrested on Dec. 24 did several things wrong. The first was to allegedly forge a police parking permit (something he claims he didn't do). The second was to place it on the dashboard of his silver 2002 Mercedes. And his third-and perhaps most grievous-miscalculation was to park his car in front of 260 East 66th Street, within spitting distance of the 19th Precinct.

While it's often hard to decipher the criminal mind, perhaps he chose this particular spot for his car with the thinking that if he parked near the station house, his fake permit would pass for real among the authentic permits in the windows of vehicles belonging to legitimate police officers who report to the precinct on East 67th Street.

Alas, he didn't fool a police officer who observed the suspicious placard and, after performing an investigation, located the car's owner. Upon doing so, the cop asked the motorist his status within the NYPD. To his credit, the impostor didn't pretend that he was a real cop. But that's about as far as his common sense took him.

When the officer tried to place him under arrest, the suspect started fighting with him. The officer managed, finally, to subdue the man after other cops showed up and pitched in. The prisoner was then slapped (though only metaphorically) with resisting arrest, in addition to the original charge of forging a document.

Not that it makes a lot of difference, but after he was cuffed and informed of his Miranda rights, the prisoner allegedly admitted that he'd placed the placard on his dashboard. However, he said he wasn't the forger. He claimed he'd found the document on East 65th Street between First and Second avenues and simply seized the opportunity to use it for free parking.

On a Bank Roll

There have been a robust number of bank robberies around the city in recent weeks. But in what may be a first, a bandit entered the North Fork Bank at 1258 Second Avenue on Dec. 31 and, borrowing Middle Eastern tactics, informed a teller that he was wired to explode.

The incident occurred around 3:15 p.m. on the final day of the year, when the suspect, wearing a dark-colored coat, visited the branch and handed the teller a note. Perhaps as an indication of how routine bank robbery has become, he penned the note on the back of a deposit slip that came not from the North Fork bank, but from an HSBC bank he'd apparently visited previously.

The note stated, "This is a robbery! I have a gun and a bomb. Give me the large bills Quicky! [sic] No alarms, or it will explode! No tricks or I shoot."

As if the note wasn't alarming enough, the perp stated, to underscore his seriousness: "It's a robbery. Hurry up or I'll pull this thing."

And then he drew the bank employee's attention to a wire dangling from the left sleeve of his jacket. The teller, prudently, handed over approximately $2,250, and the perp fled on foot southbound on Second Avenue.

The police responded to the scene and put what is known as a "Level 1 Mobilization" into effect. The plan calls for all available patrol cars to do a grid search of the area and cover escape routes such as the F.D.R. Drive. Unfortunately, the effort failed to turn up the suspect, described as a Caucasian male, 5-foot-8, 160 pounds and 36 years old.

The cops are also examining the possibility that this may be the same perp (featured in last week's Crime Blotter) who visited the Chase Manhattan Bank at 770 Lexington Avenue on Dec. 20, placed a plastic bag on the counter and opened it to reveal several tubes wrapped in scary-looking red and beige wires. In that case he did even better, making off with approximately $15,000.

Ralph Gardner Jr. can be reached at rgard135@aol.com.

It needs to be said, however, that "influence" can sometimes turn out to be a slippery concept in discussions of artistic development, and it may be that Dow's influence as an artist and as a teacher and theorist is now, in this exhibition, given a good deal more weight than either his art or his ideas can support. Like O'Keeffe, Max Weber made much of Dow's influence on his work, but it is nonetheless worth asking: To what extent does Weber's painting illustrate this influence? The lovely little still life by Weber in the current show, The Set Table (circa 1917), is a pure distillation of the Cézannean pictorial aesthetic, which was entirely alien to Dow's narrower, more academic sensibility. The fact is, Dow remained indifferent to precisely those innovations of the School of Paris that played a decisive role in shaping Weber's early pictorial accomplishments. So, for the most part, did O'Keeffe, upon whose early work Dow did indeed exert an emphatic influence but not, I think, an especially salutary one. She seems to have remained all too faithful for far too long a time to some of Dow's more provincial mystifications.

It would be a mistake, in any case, for newcomers to Dow's work to expect to find in this exhibition a major, heretofore undiscovered master of the modern movement. Gifted as he certainly was, especially as a painter of landscape, Dow remains a minor 19th-century American artist of the post-Whistler, pre-Armory Show period. Chronologically, he belongs to the generation of John Singer Sargent and Childe Hassam, all born in the 1850's, though he was never their equal in accomplishment. His closest esthetic affinities-as a painter, anyway-are with an American painter of an earlier generation, John La Farge, born 1835. To an even greater extent than La Farge, Dow made a specialty of aligning the conventions of 19th-century landscape painting, both American and European, with ideas borrowed from the traditions of Japanese estheticism. This was his principal claim to fame, as an artist and as a teacher and theorist.

Yet in the annals of American painting it was Whistler, born in 1834, who was primarily responsible for presiding over the integration of Japonism into the painting of landscape. This was something that Dow steadfastly refused to acknowledge, dismissing Whistler's achievement as a mere imitation of Japanese art. He was similarly dismissive of Gauguin, whom he had actually met in Pont-Aven, and of Van Gogh, going so far as to claim that their work contained nothing that the Japanese hadn't already done better. He seems never to have understood that his own adaptations of Japonist form were far more conservative and academic than theirs.

The paradox about all this is that Dow had really devoted a great deal of study to Japanese art, largely under the influence of the great scholar and connoisseur of Asian art, Ernest Fenollosa. Dow even served as a curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1890's. What he carried over into his own art, however-and what he seems to have transmitted to his students, several of whom besides O'Keeffe and Weber are also represented in the current exhibition-was more the decorative than the dramatic or expressive elements in Japanese art. Thus, what he took to be the essence of the Japanese esthetic often turned out to be little more than a facile pastiche of Japanese design. Which is why even Max Weber, in a fond reminiscence of his days as Dow's student, later observed of Dow: "He wasn't a teacher on the pictorial side of art, of space art, flat space art, but a great teacher of design, the pattern, the two dimensional, as manifested in the greatest examples of the Far Eastern art."

This distinction between "the pictorial side of art," on the one hand, and "pattern" or "design," on the other, is clearly discernible in Dow's own work as a painter and printmaker. By and large, he shows considerable command of the pictorial side of art in his landscape paintings, while much of his production as a printmaker, where his reductive mode of Japonism is a liability, rarely rises above the level of period design. Among the landscape paintings, moreover, the stronger pictures are the earlier ones from the 1880's, painted under the influence of conservative 19th-century French conventions. When, in the 1880's and the first years of the 20th century, Dow's landscape paintings finally make a bow to Impressionist color and Post-Impressionist facture, their pictorial structure remains academic. It is pre-Impressionist landscape painting with an overlay of modern effects. Some of these paintings are indeed very charming, but they are hardly ground-breaking pictures in either their conception or their execution.

In the current exhibition at Spanierman's, these very pleasant pictures are surrounded by a great many other objects-heaps of photographs, prints, watercolors, ceramics and textile designs, as well as furniture in the Arts and Crafts Movement style of the time. The somewhat jumbled installation resembles that of an auction-room exhibition before a big sale, and this makes it difficult to determine exactly what is supposed to reflect Dow's direct influence and what is merely reflective of the ideas that influenced Dow himself and a great many other talents of the period. For this reason, perhaps, the exhibition might more accurately have been called Arthur Wesley Dow: His Art and His Period .

Dow's own contribution to photography, for example, appears to have been insignificant. His cyanotype (blueprint) pictures are more of a historical curiosity than a major contribution to the photography of the period. There are some marvelous photographs in the show, but none is by Dow. And there are other curiosities as well-some watercolors by Alvin Langdon Coburn, who was indeed a great photographer but who clearly made the right decision when he abandoned painting for the camera. I don't doubt that Coburn found Dow to be an inspiring teacher, but Coburn was by far the greater artist. Arthur Wesley Dow: His Art and His Influence does leave one with a vivid sense of an interesting career and an interesting period. Yet both the exhibition and the large, scholarly book-length hardcover catalogue that accompanies it make too many outsize claims for Dow's artistic importance. So long as it is understood that this is a major exhibition of a minor artist, it is certainly worth some attention. It remains on view at the Spanierman Gallery, 45 East 58th Street, through Jan. 15.

There's no one quite like him-and how I wish there were! His happy marriage of technology and theater has created a unique contribution at the very time it's most needed. He humanizes the technological, rather than being swamped by it. On the eve of a new age-our Brave New World-Mr. Lepage's masterly theater of memorable images dissolves seamlessly into the void. His stories are not small, not middlebrow. They burst from a center of playfulness and admirable sensual simplicity. His experimental collaborative work with the Ex Machina company of Quebec is the future.

Geometry of Miracles , Mr. Lepage's homage to the new and the spiritual in the hallucinatory form of Frank Lloyd Wright and the philosopher-guru G.I. Gurdjieff, strikes us immediately as a boldly original idea. But then, an earlier brilliant piece, Needles and Opium , linked Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis in an instinctive free fall of surreal stage pictures and words. Cocteau and Davis were at the barricades of the modern, of course; and both were addicts (opium for the poet, heroin for the jazzman).

So Wright and Gurdjieff are linked in an unexpected new light. The modernist revolutionary who created organic architecture and the spiritual teacher who taught self-knowledge through organic movement were both icons. Both were monumental egotists with slavish followers, and both were revolutionary mavericks.

Some say Gurdjieff was a manipulative charlatan. Mr. Lepage suggests so in Geometry of Miracles (which was all too briefly part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival). Rodrigue Proteau, the amazing actor who plays him like a bullheaded samurai, also plays Gurdjieff's double, Beelzebub, a naked apparition we first see emerging miraculously from Wright's desk to sit on the master's knee like a narcissistic lap dancer. The spiritual guide and the devil are joined at the hip, as it were.

It was Wright's bossy third wife, Olgivanna, who was the true Gurdjieff disciple. In 1934, she invited the mystic (and gourmet) to Wright's Wisconsin base, Taliesin. Wright was struck by his presence and admired his holistic ideas, but Gurdjieff's influence on his architecture is more speculative than Mr. Lepage makes out.

I first came across Gurdjieff in the company of Peter Brook, whose early experimental work was influenced by him. Some of the exercises of Mr. Brook's Paris-based troupe were similar to Gurdjieff's work on self-awareness and inner harmony. The hypnotic Gurdjieffian dance movements that are the dreamlike feature of Geometry of Miracles still look a little fascistic to my untutored eyes. But Mr. Lepage is linking Gurdjieff's "sacred dances" and unity of self to Wright's mastery of space and nature, and geometric images.

So much for scholarship unless, by chance, you would like me to dip into René Daumal's unfinished masterpiece, Mount Analogue , which grappled with the Gurdjieffian mystery of essence ("Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become/ In desiring to become, you begin to live"), in addition to, of course, the collected works of Gurdjieff's main man, the Russian-born P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947). The point is, Mr. Lepage thankfully treats the tricky spiritual aspects of Geometry of Miracles with a sense of humor. Icon-bashing is one of the healthy games he plays.

His fictional Gurdjieff drops dead from his own hysterical, hyperventilating attempts to stop his devoted disciples from mimicking his every gesture. In another dazzling scene, Mr. Lepage has Herbert Johnson of the Johnson Wax fortune-Wright famously designed his headquarters in Wisconsin-tap-dancing the words of an inspired letter to his secretary, who's a sunny, bosomy bloke in drag, miming typing. "Now read that back to me!" he says when he stops. For a few dizzying moments, it's like watching a breezy 1930's movie.

But as always with Mr. Lepage, there are images of exceptional simplicity and beauty. He re-creates the toadstool columns of Wright's visionary Johnson Wax building with the magically naïve device of having Wright's students place several plates on top of the wine glasses that were laid out for dinner. Gurdjieff's erotic encounter with a young girl is suggested when he whirls them both through space; an effortless doodle of a spiral by Wright on paper looks familiar-the instant prototype for the Guggenheim Museum.

Mr. Lepage's synthesis of theater with film and dance, shadow play and music has its own architecture and organic integrity. At his most creative, everything proceeds with utter naturalness, as it did with his seven-hour masterpiece, The Seven Streams of the River Ota . Its imaginative scale was fantastic. With its central design motif of a triptych screen that pulsated like a heart, the story evolved from Hiroshima in 1945 to a Rear Window view of a 1960's New York apartment block, to the terrible assisted suicide of a young man with AIDS, to a holocaust of mirrors, and a bunraku story of how, by a strange twist of fate, the search for an aphrodisiac for the lovers of the Emperor of China led herbalists to invent what was to become the atomic bomb.

In its awesome way, Seven Streams was about beginning again. So is the two-hour traffic of Geometry of Miracles . It's a less ambitious piece, however, and it loses focus and steam in its second act. They ran out of ideas! It's almost reassuring. Mr. Lepage has come thus far, it seems, to end with a whimper-or a shrug-with a scene set in a disco, which has about as much in common with Wright and Gurdjieff as Puff Daddy. But then, I still remember it-this final image of order danced out of chaos, like a pagan celebration of renewed harmonious life.