If you build it, they will come. (Public Art Fund)

“When you want to do something crazy, you go to your friends,” said Susan Freedman, the long-time president of the Public Art Fund. “You go to someone who won’t think you’re so crazy.”

Ms. Freedman was sitting on one of the granite benches that encircles the plaza of Columbus Circle on a recent morning. Fall was in the air, the chill of the granite seeping through our pant legs. Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus, Ms. Freedman’s latest commission, had just opened, and the customary lines snaked by behind her.

Some 70-feet up in the air, Gaetano Russo's sculpture of Christopher Columbus was comfortably at home inside a living room built by Mr. Nishi. Or, rather, conceived of by him. Like he has done in cities around the world, the Japanese artist had created an unusual environment for a popular statue to reside in and invited the public to come for a visit. But he did not build, did not construct, the structure in Columbus Circle, his biggest yet. That job fell to one of Ms. Freedman’s friends, Dan Tishman.

Mr. Tishman’s eponymous family firm has been developing and building office towers, hotels and more in the city and across the country for three generations. Mr. Tishman’s father built the first World Trade Center, and it has fallen to Tishman Construction to rebuild those 16 acres, along with erecting such contemporary icons as One Bryant Park and Hudson Yards.

In the meantime, Mr. Tishman has developed a niche as the go-to builder for some of the city’s most ambitious public art projects—a portfolio that continues to grow. “The Public Art Fund and the artists they work with have a vision, in a way it is similar to working with top architects on jobs we build around the world,” Mr. Tishman said in an email. The art projects do present their own unique challenges, though. “Building freestanding scaffolding over a subway line or waterfalls in the harbor give our engineers and builders a unique opportunity to stretch their problem solving muscles,” Mr. Tishman explained

It was Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls in the East River that first inspired Ms. Freedman to call her old high school friend from the Upper West Side, to see if he knew anyone who might be able to execute such an audacious project. He volunteered himself. Since then, they have worked on Sol Lewitt's retrospective in and around City Hall Park last year, where Tishman fabricated two giant concrete sculptures, and now Discovering Columbus.

The first piece of the project was assembling the scaffolding to reach an appropriate height to create Mr. Nishi's living room. As they talked about the project, Mr. Tishman and Ms. Freedman realized it also presented the perfect opportunity to allow for the conservation of the statue, as well. Wooden platforms were brought in at first to allow for the initial restoration work and will return after the show closes to finish the conservation project. When the wood was removed, it revealed an interesting metal lattice work. "At first, people thought they were just working on the plaza again," Tishman senior vice-president Pamela Friedlander said during a tour of the project. "Only when we started to take out the wood and put up the signage did a lot of people figure it out"

The team built a fairly conventional construction scaffolding system, even recycling bars and joints that had been used during repairs to the George Washington Bridge—reduce, reuse, recycle! Still, in this unusual configuration, it creates a web metal that is not only functional but visually striking.

The site posed some unusual challenges. As Mr. Tishman pointed out, a subway line runs underneath Columbus Circle, the oldest in the city in fact, making for an incredibly shallow foundation. This meant the scaffolding had to rest on the ground, rather than being drilled into it, which would have also necessitated repairs to the recently renovated plaza, a step the builders wanted to avoid. Their solution was four massive multi-ton concrete anchors, one at each corner, set onto neoprene pads to protect the plaza.

The other issue the subways presented was the cars rumbling along underground, along with the winds blowing in off the avenues and Central Park, would cause the pillar and statue to sway slightly. That is why Christopher Columbus appears to rest atop a large circular coffee table in the middle of the living room. But it is more than just a table. The black ring not only serves as a buffer to keep zealous visitors at bay, it also hides the hole built around the statue to accommodate its movement. The coffee table is then affixed to the statue with a neoprene gasket and is fitted out with rolling casters so that it can imperceptibly move each time a train passes or the wind blows.

"Our goal is to create this beautiful room," Ms. Friedlander said. It may be a different set of design constraints, but the goal is the same as on any Tishman project."

Mr. Nishi was astonished by the work. "While I didn't see much difference" from other projects, he said through an interpreter, "I was expecting, just from my experience from other things, that American people are very sloppy." Mr. Nishi himself broke in here and blurted out "Sorry! Sorry!" and began bowing repeatedly, but the interpreter insisted it was a story with a happy ending, as Mr. Nishi began to smile. "But this turned out to be the most precise project I have ever done," the interpreter continued on Mr. Nishi's behalf. "It was amazing."

Ms. Friedlander said Tishman is already fielding more requests, including from the Public Art Fund. She acknowledged that working with artists is not always easy, but that can be part of the fun. "It can be tough going back and forth with the artist, especially when you're working under a compressed time frame," Ms. Friedlander said. "Our guys are like, 'Just pick a crown molding.' But it does matter because this is an aesthetic piece and working that into what we do is very rewarding."

Ms. Freedman said having a firm with Tishman's capabilities in the city will only further push the boundaries on what kind of public art the city can expect. "It's wonderful to know we can pick up the phone and say 'We have an artist dreaming a big dream, can you help us make it a reality?' and the answer will be yes," she said.

Correction:An earlier version of this post called Ms. Freedman the Public Art Fund's director. She is its president. It also said that Tishman had performed the renovation to the George Washington Bridge. It did not, simply boring the scaffolding from a project performed by another firm to use here. The Observer regrets the errors.

Stainless steel can be pricy too: Though Rob Pruitt's Andy Monument looks like it was forged from steel, it is in fact Fiberglass coated with reflective material. (Photo: James Ewing)

Sculptors have prized bronze for thousands of years, but some artists are abandoning it for other materials, as the price of copper, one of the key materials for making bronze, has risen in recent years, The Wall Street Journal reports today.

Marc Fields, the owner of a New York sculptor-supply company, tells The Journal that the price of bronze has tripled since 2008, and now stands at $7 per pound.

Artists instead seeking cheaper alternatives. Writes Daniel Grant:

"Mr. Fields said a growing number of artists are looking to Aqua-Resin, concrete, Fiberglass, gypsum- and polyurethane-based resins, plaster and terra cotta—which are less expensive than bronze... He said many of his customers are buying metal and mica powders that are poured into molds or applied as a patina to give a 'faux finis' that resembles bronze or other metals. In fact, resin sculptures are often labeled as 'cold cast bronze' or 'bonded bronze,' which may lead some buyers to believe they are purchasing a traditional bronze sculpture."

Caveat emptor!

Material prices have also altered the plans of some of New York's brightest art stars, including the panda-smitten artist Rob Pruitt, whose shiny Andy Warhol statue, The Andy Monument, now on view in Union Square, ran into trouble over the cost of stainless steel. A $80,000 bid to produce the sculpture using that material "ran into some budgetary limitations," Mr. Pruitt tells Mr. Grant.

Thankfully, a solution was found:

"Someone suggested casting the piece in fiberglass, which cut the foundry costs in half (a different foundry was used). A coating on the sculpture gave it a metallic look, so you would never know."

We suspect that Warhol, who made some of his most beautiful paintings by peeing on canvases coated with paint--copper-based paint, no less--would have loved it.

Mr. Baume is Australian, and he arrived in New York this fall at the age of 44 by way of Boston, where he spent the last 6 years as head curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art. The only other time he has lived in New York was in the late 1980s, when he spent one summer as an intern in the drawings department at the Museum of Modern Art and another as a junior curator at the Grey Art Gallery at N.Y.U.

Mr. Baume’s appointment as director of the Public Art Fund signals a sort of reboot for the 32-year-old organization, whose presence in the city is thought to have diminished following the 2005 resignation of longtime director Tom Eccles. The post-Eccles era at the Public Art Fund, overseen by Rochelle Steiner before she stepped down last spring, was marked by a significant decrease in the number of projects being produced because the organization was devoting so much money and manpower to the realization of The New York City Waterfalls, the hugely ambitious and expensive installation by artist Olafur Eliasson.

“There were other things as well, but every decision is going to have its opportunity cost, and as an organization you have to decide where to put your resources and your energy,” Mr. Baume said in a recent interview. “The waterfalls were the really big project. There isn’t a lot in the pipeline now, but that’s great for me, in the sense that I get to dream up the program and get it going.”

“He has a clean slate in terms of programming,” said Public Art Fund president Susan Freedman, who led the search committee that hired Mr. Baume over the summer. “You can look at that as rebooting, but it’s an opportunity.”

Less than two months into his new job, Mr. Baume is so far unwilling to go into specifics about how the Public Art Fund’s priorities might change under his leadership. He did say, however, that he is looking forward to commissioning work from artists with whom he has worked in the past—a list that includes Sol Llewitt, Thomas Hirschorn, Anish Kapoor and Cornelia Parker—and exploring the intersection of art and architecture.

He added that he wants to commission work from artists all over the world to reflect New York’s status as a “global city.”

Mr. Eccles, an outspoken Scotsman who is now the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, said Mr. Baume’s first order of business should be to make himself at home in the city.

“What he needs to do is become a New Yorker for a while, you know?” Mr. Eccles said. “That’s probably the most important thing in that job. Because you’re making work for New Yorkers, right? You have to be empathetic, understanding and in dialogue with people of very different strata of the city: You need to know the guy who sells hot dogs and the titans of real estate. … You don’t make the city, the city makes you, you know? ”

Mr. Eccles said Mr. Baume should be ready to familiarize himself with the idiosyncratic and complex work of attaining permissions and funding from the city government, and to apply a set of social skills he may not have had occasion to practice in his museum career.

“You’re dealing with a lot of people who are either in power or who feel empowered,” said Mr. Eccles. “It’s a very different kind of bureaucracy, and it’s got some rough and tumble. … You’re almost running for election every day in this position. You do have the New York Post after you, and you do have to stand up for what you believe in.”

Mr. Baume said he is undaunted by the city bureaucracy, not least because the Bloomberg administration—unlike the Giuliani administration—has been consistently and uncommonly supportive of public art projects.

He also said that he plans to continue the Public Art Fund’s tradition of being artist-centric as opposed to tailoring projects to community needs or municipal development efforts.

“I’m curious to hear what people think—not because I’ll do what everyone wants me to do but because I want people to feel invested in the enterprise and supportive of it,” Mr. Baume said. “But I wouldn’t want us to be seen as implementing anybody else’s agenda.”

So far Mr. Baume has been spending his time walking around the city looking at potential sites and reaching out to artists and gallerists. He has hired a deputy director, Richard Griggs, a longtime project manager at the Public Art Fund who gave up his full time position with the organization after Mr. Eccles stepped down. The first show to open under Mr. Baume’s watch is a group sculpture show called Double Take at the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn. 

lneyfakh@observer.com