The Boeing Company

DREAMING BIG: When Boeing pitched the 787 to potential buyers, mock-ups showed roomy interior cabins.

The Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” is supposed to revolutionize air travel: better cabin climate, less airsickness, reduced jet lag, fewer headaches—and even babies that may not cry as much.

With the 787 at its three-month anniversary in service, these promises were put to the test on an 11½-hour flight from Tokyo to Frankfurt earlier this month. Overall, cabin comfort was clearly better, and big windows and voluminous overhead bins are definitely cool. But make no mistake—it’s still an airplane.

The Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” was billed as a revolution for travelers, offering a more humid, comfortable cabin and lighting that would lessen fatigue, dry eyes and jet lag. Scott McCartney on Lunch Break looks at the validity of those claims.

“If you put me in a blind test, I would say this is no different,” said Winfried Scherle, a senior executive at lens maker Carl Zeiss AG, during the Feb. 3 flight.

Others said they landed feeling more refreshed. They had an easier time sleeping, felt their eyes and nasal passages didn’t dry out as much as usual. Still, it was a modest improvement, not dramatic difference. Oh, and a baby still wailed onboard.

Boeing points to design changes both inside and out of the cabin that make for a better ride. With a body largely constructed of super-strong plastics—carbon-fiber composite material—instead of aluminum, the 787 can have higher cabin humidity since rust isn’t a worry. The humidity level in the Dreamliner cabin is 10% to 15%, compared with 4% to 7% typical in other airplanes. But 15% is still extremely dry—about the same relative humidity as the average summer afternoon in Las Vegas, according to meteorological data.

The cabin is pressurized to a lower altitude than conventional jets, lessening the effects of being high in the air, such as headaches and fatigue, because of a 6% improvement in oxygen absorbed by the body at 6,000 feet compared with 8,000 feet, according to a Boeing spokeswoman. Studies show big windows help reduce motion sickness, Boeing said, and LED lighting that can simulate sunrise, for example, can help ease jet-lag effects.

A new aircraft stability system that will make for smoother rides in turbulence is still only partially functional in the five 787s in service, but an updated software load planned within weeks will improve the ride even more, according to the aircraft maker. Fuel efficiency and emissions are 20% better than the Boeing 767, a similarly sized jet.

Does it live up to the hype? Japanese airline All Nippon Airways, the launch customer for the 787, started flying it regionally within Asia on Nov. 1 then added long-haul service between Tokyo and Frankfurt on Jan. 21. The long-haul flights are the real test of passenger comfort.

“To me, it didn’t feel like a revolution. It felt like a natural evolution. It was different but it wasn’t hugely different,” said Michael Grepo, a computer-systems expert for the U.S. government who took a long weekend last month to fly the new 787. He said he didn’t feel as short of breath as he does on other aircraft, and he didn’t have to hold his nose and blow to clear his ears as often. Orange light on the cabin ceiling before landing simulated sunrise and was calming, Mr. Grepo said. It seemed to make a difference psychologically.

As for the humidity, “it still felt like I was drying out, but it wasn’t as bad or noticeable as on a regular airplane,” said Mr. Grepo.

I flew from Tokyo to Frankfurt on Feb. 3 and could feel the Dreamliner differences. My contact lenses didn’t dry out as much as they usually do on long flights; same for my nose. I only slept an hour, partly because a nearby infant wailed several times during the night, even though the Dreamliner is supposed to lessen air-pressure pain in babies. Still, I wasn’t dragging as much as I usually am after sleepless overnight trips.

Small details do make a difference. The plane comes standard with individual air vents over passengers, something that is rarely found on wide-body jets. That gives each passenger more control of air flow and temperature. And the large 787 window offered a beautiful panoramic view of Tokyo on departure.

Nobumi Matsuda, who runs an eye clinic in Tokyo and is studying the eye health of airline pilots in Japan, downed three bottles of water during the Feb. 3 flight and said the 787 humidity improvement just wasn’t enough. “I thought there would be more,” he said. “It’s half-and-half. I half like it, and I’m half disappointed.”

As for passenger disappointment, Boeing said in a written response: “While it could be argued that the passenger comfort improvements are incremental, the combination of so many improvements in one airplane is revolutionary in our opinion.”

The Dreamliner ranks as the fastest-selling commercial jet in history, with 59 airlines around the world ordering 870 of them. Deliveries began more than three years late, and yet serial production problems didn’t lessen the promised improvements in travel.

Now, it is scheduled to hit U.S. airports later this year. Japan Airlines says it will fly the 787 between Tokyo and Boston beginning April 22, and Tokyo and San Diego next December. ANA says as Boeing delivers more planes it will add Seattle and San Jose, Calif., as 787 destinations from Tokyo. The first 787 to be delivered to United Airlines is under construction and is expected before the end of this year.

Passenger loads on the 787 have been higher than other flights, indicating popularity of the new plane, ANA said, and the carrier believes the 787 is drawing travelers away from competing airlines and bullet trains.

The 787 is designed to carry 220 to 250 passengers, according to Boeing. ANA has outfitted some 787s with 264 seats for short trips and 787s to be used in long-haul flights with only 158 seats—64 of them in a roomy business-class cabin that takes up half of the jets floor space with lie-flat seats cocooned individually.

So far, passengers have been thrilled, ANA said. A more detailed study will be conducted at the end of February. “Cabin attendants say it’s much better for their skin,” an ANA spokesman added.

Some of the benefits may be so subtle that it takes awhile for passengers to notice. Just after waking up, Thorsten Hoffmann, a sales executive from Germany, said the plane feels like a normal plane—he expected to feel more different. But after landing, he changed his view of the 787.

“I feel really good,” Mr. Hoffmann said exiting the plane. “I slept longer on this flight than I ever have before on a flight. Maybe there really is a difference.”

Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com

By STACY MEICHTRY

Courtesy of VistaJet

A Bombardier Global Express VistaJet tagged by graffiti artist RETNA

Dinner with Thomas Flohr, the private- jet mogul, began with a ruse. He was already seated by the time I arrived at the Milanese trattoria, where nearly all diners were squeezed two-by-two into white-tablecloth tables that nearly touched. Flohr’s table was different.

He had told the waiters we expected a third person to join us, so the staff adjoined a neighboring table to ours. An extra place setting was laid, along with an empty wine glass. When a bottle of red arrived at the table, Flohr told the waiter to go ahead and pour for the phantom diner. Perplexed, I asked who else was coming.

“No one,” he replied. “I hate small tables.”

Flohr wanted a buffer between us and the trattoria’s bustle, and concocting a cover story was merely his way of securing it. The price of privacy is something of an obsession for Flohr. His company, VistaJet, sells flights aboard private jets for an hourly fee, a business he aims to make as seamless and consistent as checking into a luxury hotel. A flight between London and Moscow aboard one of Flohr’s silver jets can be arranged for 40,000 euros, which is roughly equivalent to “burning through four Hermès handbags,” Flohr notes.

Photograph by Alexia S

ALL IN THE FAMILY | Thomas Flohr, at home in Milan with his daughter, Nina, and a work by Barry McGee on the wall

His talk of handbag bonfires isn’t completely incidental. Flohr aspires to bring the idiosyncrasy and perfectionism of a fashion designer to the conservative world of aviation. He himself doesn’t look like a fashion plate. His scraggly hair is long enough to tuck behind his ears, like a teenage skateboarder. Jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of silkscreened Converse are his idea of business attire.

He has instead placed VistaJet’s image in the hands of Nina Flohr, his 25-year-old daughter with ex-wife Katharina Flohr, the creative director of Fabergé and a former editor of “Russian Vogue.” When recently asked by her father to come up with branding concepts for the company, Nina took a freshly minted $45 million Bombardier jet and had its tail fin splashed with graffiti.

Behind the gilded veneer, however, the Flohr family must navigate the perilous straits that come with owning and operating a fleet of private jets across myriad countries and airspaces. The heady days of the private aviation industry, when easy credit fueled a race to snap up planes, evaporated with the 2008 financial crisis. The private jet, once a must-have accessory for the über-rich and corporate jet set, has now become a symbol of excess and, in some cases, shame.

With overleveraged jetsetters scrambling to dump their planes in the wake of the crisis, a global glut of second-hand jets developed, and the hangover is depressing demand for private flights and the jets themselves. Flohr, meanwhile, is going up against a raft of competitors, ranging from charter services to deep-pocketed figures like Warren Buffett, whose firm, Berkshire Hathaway, owns the U.S.-based NetJets, which pioneered fractional jet ownership.

The firm, in its efforts to recover from the financial crisis, has begun selling prepaid private flights, bringing it into direct competition with VistaJet. It has also sought to expand in Europe, Flohr’s home court, by teaming up with a sister company that forged a deal earlier this year with Lufthansa to provide private connecting flights within the continent for first-class passengers who make long-haul trips with the German carrier.

So far Flohr has managed to defy these gravity-like forces, and he maintains that he’s well positioned to profit from the reordering of the global economy. Charging clients by the hour—rather than requiring them to hold stakes in the multimillion-dollar planes—allows the chastened jetsetters to “trade down” to VistaJet, Flohr says. He has also focused VistaJet’s expansion on emerging markets, such as Russia, Asia, Africa and the Middle East—regions that so far have managed to steer clear of the economic malaise that dogs the West.

Anna Studenikova

Nina Flohr’s 18th birthday also featured actors dressed as Bolshevik peasants.

Most of Flohr’s rivals in the chartering business operate planes owned by someone else, an arrangement that cuts the risk that comes with having a multimillion-dollar plane on your books. Flohr has taken a different approach. He buys new aircraft in bulk—he currently has 2 billion euros’ worth on order from jetmaker Bombardier—and sells the aircraft back into the secondary market before their warranties run out, a tack that helps contain his maintenance costs. By buying his own jets, Flohr also exercises total control over the operations and aesthetics of his fleet. In other words, it’s easier to graffiti the tail fin of a plane that you actually own.

So far the strategy is paying off. Flohr is extremely tight-lipped about the finances of his closely held firm, but he says VistaJet’s revenue rose 25 percent, to 300 million euros, in 2011. That doesn’t mean the approach is without risk. A sudden drop in the private-jet market could blow a hole in the value of his fleet. VistaJet also contends with constantly changing regulations, volatile fuel prices and demanding clientele. “You throw all that in there and it’s a tough business to run,” says James Butler, an attorney specializing in private aviation.

Flohr grew up in the working-class village of Erlenbach, in the German countryside, where his father taught vocational skills at a local high school. As a young man, he applied for flight training at Lufthansa’s offices in Hamburg but was politely turned away. Flohr attended the University of Munich and later moved to Switzerland. There, he married Katharina Konecny, then a budding fashion editor.

In the decade that followed, Flohr worked his way up the ranks of Chicago-based technology firm Comdisco, taking the reins of the firm’s asset finance business and aggressively expanding it into Europe. In the mid-1990s, the firm’s founder died and Flohr clashed with his son over strategy. The tension led to Flohr’s resignation in 2000. Flohr vested his 1.5 percent stake in the company, which had a total market value of about $2 billion at the time. A year after his departure, Comdisco filed for Chapter 11, and, during the bankruptcy proceedings, Flohr snapped up the biggest parts of its asset finance business in Europe—the same one he’d built from scratch years earlier.

Flohr and Katharina divorced when Nina was five. Later, at “Russian Vogue,” Katharina and her elaborate editorial spreads helped put the magazine on the map in the late 1990s, when the country’s newly minted billionaires were beginning to splash out on luxury goods. Nina often tagged along, globe-trotting to exotic locations, as her mother groomed her for a career. “All she ever wanted for me was to work in the fashion industry,” Nina says.

Nina’s time at boarding school—and sitting front row at fashion shows in Milan and Paris—also brought her into contact with the heirs and heiresses of Europe’s wealthiest families, ranging from Margherita Missoni of the namesake Italian fashion label to Bianca Brandolini d’Adda, who hails from Italian nobility.

For her 18th birthday, Nina’s parents threw an elaborate weekend masquerade party for her and 300 friends in St. Petersburg. The event demonstrated both her father’s financial prowess and her mother’s flair for set design. On day one, guests were invited to revel amid a historical reenactment of the rise of communism. In a Hollywood-worthy production, horses and actors dressed as Bolshevik peasants plodded through a faux countryside of high grass, paperboys handed out pamphlets and—as the night progressed—Soviet soldiers marched on the party as the Flohr family’s coterie nibbled on hors d’oeuvres. The next night was an homage to Imperial Russia, as guests, outfitted with masks handmade by a local art school, dined inside a palatial gallery where Catherine the Great once held court.

Both Nina and her father concede that such reveries expose them to unwelcome rich-and-famous stereotypes. “I’m sure some people said it was completely extravagant, but at the end of the day, in everything we do, we try not to be utterly outlandish,” Nina says.

What might appear to be decadence is actually devotion to detail, according to Flohr. Nina is known as “Nein-a” among friends, Brandolini d’Adda says, for her Teutonic sense of order and self-discipline. Flohr says his obsession with aesthetics is also what propelled him toward the aviation business. Flohr’s work in asset finance required constant travel, so in 2003 he decided to buy his own plane, a secondhand Learjet. “This guy turned up at our Paris air show in jeans and a T-shirt, which is a bit of a first for us,” says Bob Horner, head of worldwide sales for Bombardier, the maker of Learjet. “It took a while for our guys to take him seriously.”

Flohr wanted his jet to cut a figure on the runway, so he had it painted metallic silver with a red stripe down its side. The jet became so popular that Flohr found himself constantly chartering it out to third parties. His solution: Buy more planes and give them a paint job.

Nina is one of the few people Flohr trusts to second-guess him, and when she finished high school, Flohr tapped her for an assignment that would pave the way for entering the firm years later. Flohr had recently purchased a small aircraft management firm in Salzburg, Austria, and he was struggling to overhaul its leadership, which had grown resistant to change. Flohr says he initially lacked the “guts” to fire his managers and bring in a new team.

Flohr sent in his teen daughter to size up the situation—a move that raised eyebrows in Salzburg. Nina recalled getting a lecture on the meaning of life from the wife of the company’s former owner, who was still involved in running the firm. But Nina’s assessment was unsparing—the company needed new management—and Flohr acquiesced.

In 2008, VistaJet had its first taste of real turbulence. The collapse of Lehman Brothers froze credit markets, unleashing panic across the global economy. Financing to buy and operate private jets dried up as flying in a private jet became a symbol of corporate excess. In one of the industry’s lower moments, General Motors then–chief executive Rick Wagoner and other auto executives were publicly upbraided for traveling by private jet to Washington, D.C., for congressional hearings on emergency bailouts for their respective companies. “That was bad judgment,” Flohr says sotto voce.

For Flohr the financial crisis was also a major gut check. The day Lehman collapsed, VistaJet had tens of millions of dollars tied up in orders for new jets. Flohr did not back out of his commitments with Bombardier; days later he took deliveries for three jets.

“The cost of a flight between London and Moscow is roughly equivalent to “burning through four Hermès handbags, says Flohr.”

What followed in 2009, Flohr says, was a year of “sleepless nights.” Flohr slashed his hourly rates by up to 20 percent and pushed his sales force for bookings. He also had some luck. By the end of the year, the jet prices had begun to stabilize, allowing VistaJet to break even or, as Flohr put it, book a “black zero.”

The next year he shifted strategy. Instead of buying lower-cost Learjets, which can’t make long-haul flights without refueling, Flohr focused on buying bigger Global Express planes, Bombardier’s $45 million flagship jet. The larger planes were much more expensive, but they also retained more of their value, Flohr says, making them easier to resell than Learjets.

The bigger jets would also allow Flohr to focus on flying Russian oligarchs, Chinese entrepreneurs and Middle Eastern oilmen across continents rather than targeting travelers seeking only short “hops” within Europe and the U.S. The change helped Flohr consolidate his presence in the emerging markets now driving his growth. “If you would have asked me three years ago to quote you a price from Ulan Bator to Shanghai, I would have said forget it. Today it’s a daily route!” Flohr says.

Bigger planes also meant Flohr had a more prominent canvas for his inner designer. There were more crew members to dress, more meals to serve and more details to obsess over. Nina was again called upon in 2010—this time as the company’s new brand manager. She chucked the cabin’s polyester blankets and replaced them with cashmere throws. Finer wine began to flow, and crew uniforms were redesigned.

In her boldest move, Nina pushed her father into a partnership with graffiti artist Marquis Lewis, better known by his tag, RETNA. Flohr hosted an art exhibit for Lewis in SoHo last February, and weeks later Nina flew out to Lewis’s Los Angeles studio to talk him into plastering his tags all over the tail fin of a brand-new Global Express.

They eventually agreed on having the fin painted by aviation specialists in Munich using Lewis’s designs. It was an unorthodox stunt, for sure, but one that paid off after the plane’s unveiling in May, when it garnered VistaJet headlines across the trade press.

On a recent morning, the high-flying work of art was sitting on a tarmac in Rwanda. For Flohr, located a world away in his Milan apartment, the plane was but one of dozens he tracks daily from his MacBook, receiving real-time updates on their whereabouts, staff and passengers. Each piece of data gets crunched and analyzed by the former asset manager—all part of Flohr’s endless quest to wring cost savings from a business built on self-indulgence. “We really are detail-obsessed,” he says. “But the joy is seeing the big picture.”

By LARRY BLUMENFELD

Los Angeles

In 1977, violinist Leroy Jenkins asked Wadada Leo Smith to compose a piece for his group. Already a daring trumpeter who used silence as much as sound to communicate ideas, Mr. Smith had by then also laid the groundwork for the personalized language that defines his compositions today—informed but not constrained by jazz, and distinguished most starkly by a flexible approach to rhythm. He named the piece he handed Mr. Jenkins “Medgar Evers,” after the slain civil-rights activist. In 1998, a commission from Southwest Chamber Music, based in Pasadena, Calif., inspired Mr. Smith to compose a string quartet. Again, his title paid tribute to a significant figure in the civil-rights struggle: “Rosa Parks.”

That string quartet was a riveting highlight on Friday during Mr. Smith’s “Ten Freedom Summers,” a 21-piece work that spanned three nights in premiere at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Redcat) in Los Angeles. Halfway though Saturday’s program, “Medgar Evers,” now scored for chamber ensemble, signaled a mood shift, from tense to triumphant. “Ten Freedom Summers” is named for a 10-year stretch, from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional to the “freedom summer” voter-registration drive and Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also traces Mr. Smith’s life as a composer through 34 years—from “Medgar Evers” to his tribute to John F. Kennedy, written just last month—to form a personal reflection on the legacy of the civil-rights movement from a musician, born in Leland, Miss., in 1941, who came of age as that history took shape.

It can also be heard as a statement of artistic empowerment. Like his colleagues formatively affiliated with Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, Mr. Smith blends improvisation and form in ways that elude genre categorization. At the Redcat, his Golden Quartet, one of several groups he regularly leads, was assembled stage right, the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music ensemble stage left. In between might have stood the forbidding divide that damns most supposed “jazz-meets-classical” endeavors. Here, several pieces were played by one ensemble while the other sat silent, which could have invited uneasy tension or a dissociation of parts.

No such thing occurred, owing largely to Mr. Smith’s Golden Quartet, which adheres to jazz convention only through instrumentation. Drummer Susie Ibarra, bassist John Lindberg and pianist Anthony Davis played mere fragments of anything resembling jazz’s swinging pulse; rather, they embodied Mr. Smith’s concept of “rhythm units,” which can at first sound undefined but eventually—especially through such an expansive program—prove elastic enough to convey finely calibrated tensions and releases. The Southwest ensemble’s familiarity with Mr. Smith’s approach—it returned to his 1998 piece, “Rosa Parks,” for a 2009 recording—and music director Jeff von der Schmidt’s longstanding embrace of adventurous repertoire afforded both common purpose and shared literacy.

Mr. Smith’s Golden Quartet is a wondrous vehicle for his intent: Its performance of “America, Parts 1 & 2″ within Sunday night’s program would have anchored a satisfying club engagement. The sections combining ensembles—as a double quartet, or all 13 musicians—brought novel pleasures, such as the way the strings responded to Ms. Ibarra’s staggered beats. Saturday night ended with a breathtaking moment, when an extended passage from Ms. Ibarra and percussionist Lynn Vartan, playing timpani, abruptly stopped and the sound dissolved into a soft wash of strings. Occasionally, violin glissandi referenced both contemporary classical technique and the bent tones of the blues. Mr. Smith suggested jazz in subtler ways; his music, built on cells of melody and harmony that combine in ever-shifting fashion, created the feel of improvisation through notated parts while also sneaking the chamber musicians out of any strict sense of meter. There were impressive solo passages, especially by Messrs. Davis and Lindberg, and violinist Shalini Vijayan. But mostly this was communal music, with interlocking parts, contrasting timbres and harmonic convergences that lent weight and meaning.

Mr. Smith will celebrate his 70th birthday in December with a two-night stand featuring six different ensembles at Roulette in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Ten Freedom Summers” was as striking a display of his expansive vision and his vitality. He still plays trumpet as he always has: with little vibrato and a tone that can be either boldly declarative or soft to the point of breaking. His phrases range from skittering leaps of intervals to single notes repeated as long tones. In a work dedicated to nonviolent struggle, his most emphatic moments were often his softest. Which is not to say he lacked fire. During Sunday night’s performance, when a succession of slow and broken phrases threatened to deflate the mood, his playing grew fierce. As if summoned, his Golden Quartet quickly matched that intensity.

“Ten Freedom Summers” had a visual component too. Brief avant-gardish black-and-white films preceded each concert to bracing effect. Documentary photographs—Malcolm X, a protest march—were occasionally projected on a screen above the musicians; these seemed overly literal. During other stretches, abstract shapes morphing in real time to the music posed an opposite problem, an absence of meaning. After Sunday’s final piece, a recorded snippet of Martin Luther King Jr. was played, from his 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Mr. Smith needn’t—shouldn’t—have included this. However inspirational is King’s voice, however elemental his message, Mr. Smith had made his own statement through instrumental music. And it sounded complete.

Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.

By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Dallas

If you suggest that artists should create beautiful things, you risk being branded an old fogy. Still, few major artists today make objects as joyously beautiful as the British sculptor Tony Cragg, whose work is having its first U.S. exhibition in two decades at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Twenty-eight extraordinary pieces in a variety of ordinary substances—stainless steel, stone, bronze, plywood, plexiglass and mixed media—look handsome inside the Nasher’s capacious, light-filled bays, and outside as well. These are joined, in a smaller gallery, by Cragg’s hypnotizing paper works: sketches, drawings, watercolors, doodles that achieve a charming sublimity. Some of these look like Chuck Close paintings. Up close you see squares and circles, ones and zeroes, or mere jottings. Move farther back: A figure comes clearly into view.

But it’s the three-dimensional pieces that take your breath away. Sculpture is about the relationships among materials, shapes and forms, space, and an artist’s methods and theories. In Mr. Cragg’s case, the relation between surface and depth is equally important. Some of his pieces invite us to peer into cavelike crevasses, one thing embodied within another. Take the handsome “Ferryman,” a double figure of perforated bronze that greets visitors at the Nasher’s entrance. At first you may think you’ve encountered an abstract form resembling a seal or walrus, some upright creature. Up close, it’s one sculpture within another: The piece is ferrying itself. And the plywood “See You,” almost nine feet tall, asks you to squint into an inner space barely visible from afar. Hardness gives way to porousness, drawing you in but also inhibiting entry. Solidity cooperates, rather than competes, with openness.

Mr. Cragg began making art from tossed-out plastic objects decades ago when he started scavenging. In the current show, we have “Eroded Landscape” (1998), a gorgeous stacking of cheap hand-etched and sand-blasted glassware of different sizes and shapes (Morandi in three dimensions!). It embodies an elegant fragility, a random order, the given and the made. Equally playful in its makeshift substantiality is the 1999 “Congregation,” many pieces of wood covered with metal hooks, an assemblage of found objects including a rowboat. From afar it looks like a hairy character in an Ed Koren New Yorker cartoon, bristling with whiskers or fur.

More substantial are Mr. Cragg’s heavier pieces. A horizontal bronze, “Early Forms (St. Gallen),” curved and curling on the ground, commands its space. A smaller bronze, painted red (“Sinbad”), is as tightly bound as a spring.

Mr. Cragg makes works with family resemblances. “Early Forms” are one group; they complement the show’s largest sculptures, “Rational Beings.” These include vertical, columnar plywood constructions that seem to defy gravity. Although not figurative, some of them have the heft of great Rodin sculptures like his “Balzac.” Some seem to totter, some to balance like cantilevers. The red “Divide” soars perilously, looking like so many tectonic plates, massed and carved, moving in and out of one another. More horizontal is “Elbow,” like an airplane about to take off. In all the plywood pieces you can also cherish the supple layering caused by the lamination.

They also invite us to play the old figure-and-ground game. From several angles you see, in all of them, profiles of human faces—noses, mouths, chins—and you know that abstraction does not preclude figuration.

Mr. Cragg achieves the same stratifying effect—iterating “Rational Beings,” these columns with hints of faces—in other media. As in a family, you recognize the similarities and differences that unite and separate individual constituents. The red steel “Mixed Feelings” looks like a pile of giant communion wafers. The bronze “Accurate Figure,” 77 inches tall, maintains a tensile balance. The eight-foot bronze “It Is, It Isn’t” (Mr. Cragg’s titles are often suggestive or just mysterious), with several of those protruding, quasihuman “faces,” tempts the viewer, as do most of these, to caress the material.

Mr. Cragg’s art is at once serious and playful. As a counter to the solidity of the work in bronze, steel, even plywood, he also makes pieces like the painted white fiberglass “Companions,” gourdlike extrusions spreading gracefully in all directions. It is light in several senses. So is “Secretions,” a solid work covered with plastic dice that looks from afar like folk art, perhaps a handmade basket. Is the core secreting the dice? Are the dice pressing from without to make a core? Is there a secret in the sequence of dice? What is skin, what are bones? We’re back to the question of inside and outside.

Mr. Cragg has always called himself a “materialist.” What sculptor would not say the same? What makes him important is his transformation of raw matter into art that transcends but never allows us to forget its material. These pieces, alone and together, provoke instant and long-lasting joy.

Mr. Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English and the editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review at Southern Methodist University.

By LUCETTE LAGNADO

VERO BEACH, Fla.—Rabbi Michael Birnholz wanted a little bit of Eden for his synagogue here, so he set out to bring forth fruit upon his land, planting a collection of herbs, fruit trees and flowers mentioned in the Bible.

Heaven hasn’t always smiled on the rabbi’s efforts.

This lush, sun-drenched region, known as the Treasure Coast, is renowned for its citrus groves and semitropical vegetation. But Rabbi Birnholz’s pomegranates, date palms, fig, olive and apple trees—they aren’t all doing so well.

“I think that it is dead,” he said, surveying a shriveled pomegranate tree in the garden behind Temple Beth Shalom, a lively reform congregation. “Agriculture is not easy.”

Stuart Segal

Rabbi Michael Birnholz tends to a young grape vine at Temple Beth Shalom in Vero Beach, Fla.

“Biblical gardens” are sprouting outside churches and synagogues around the country. Collections of flora native to the Middle East were once largely the domain of professional botanical gardens or institutions such as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, whose renowned biblical garden has a $20,000 annual maintenance budget and expert gardeners and volunteers. Now, they are cropping up in synagogue and church yards from Missouri to Vermont.

The Internet makes buying exotic “biblical” seeds a cinch. And at a time when congregations of all faiths and denominations struggle to attract members, a biblical garden can be a draw—turning obscure biblical references into living, blooming realities.

Groups such as the Biblical Botanical Gardens Society offer counsel and support. A botany professor at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Va., recently published an exhaustive Dictionary of Bible Plants, which retails for $150. In Fair Haven, Vt., Pastor Marsh Hudson-Knapp, of the First Congregational Church, has been doing a brisk business selling a more modest $14 guide to growing your own biblical garden. His book cites 126 different plants and herbs that can—in theory at least—be grown in this country.

But faith, toil, and perseverance can’t always overcome the challenges presented by the differences between the climate and soil of the Middle East and various regions of America. That is why Mr. Hudson-Knapp regularly counsels would-be biblical gardeners to limit their ambitions. He himself has experienced countless setbacks—plants dying mysteriously, or simply failing to thrive.

“I haven’t eaten one fig out of my fig tree in 20 years,” he confides. Jesus in the New Testament is said to have been so irritated upon encountering a fig tree that bore no fruit that he declared: “May you never bear fruit again.” The tree withered.

The Rev. Steven Wilson, who planted a biblical garden in his church in Carthage, Mo., has had his own brushes with adversity. While his church, Grace Episcopal, escaped the devastating tornado that hit 12 miles away last May, it wasn’t as fortunate in fending off pests. A couple of years ago, members of his congregation traveled to Israel and collected seeds—including the Galilee Hollyhock, a flower mentioned in the Book of Job.

They carefully grew five saplings. “But then the Japanese beetles came,” he says, and destroyed them. A piece of the garden devoted to Middle Eastern vegetables became a tasty treat for a groundhog.

“He ate all of them—he was looking very happy with himself,” Mr. Wilson says. The congregation debated what to do about the groundhog; some wanted to trap him and move him far away. Finally, they decided to let him stay, but built a fence around the plants.

Back in Vero Beach, Rabbi Birnholz, 37, has persevered. Beth Shalom sits on five acres of land, but the rabbi has no biblical garden budget. He works on the garden himself, with Boy Scouts and others helping out. A local artist produced handsome signage for the plantings, citing chapter and verse of biblical references—Exodus 39:23-26 for the pomegranate or the Book of Ruth 2:23 for barley.

These days, the rabbi rattles off calamities that have struck his garden, from a flood to drought to pestilence. Last fall, it was so rainy and windy that one of the olive trees fell over. A willow tree was attacked by ants. A fig tree’s fruit was devoured by “critters.” A sprinkler system broke down during a dry spell.

“There are bugs, there is the weather—it definitely has the feeling of Job with all of these disasters,” the rabbi lamented.

He still is determined to make olive oil.

A couple of years ago, the temple planted four olive trees, from which the rabbi harvested altogether just one olive.

To make oil in time for Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, the rabbi obtained 140 pounds of olives from a member of the synagogue. A boy scout helped build an olive press. Members set about using it, hoping to get oil. Out came an awful lot of green gook along with oil.

A member volunteered a nonbiblical centrifuge, which separated the oil from the gunk. “We cheated a little,” the rabbi says.

There have been a couple of breakthroughs along with the heartbreak. Rabbi Birnholz still remembers how excited he felt when a grape vine produced six grapes. A tree produced one citron for the Succoth holiday.

The rabbi was sure the pomegranate tree would yield fruit. It did—one inedible pomegranate the size of a tangerine.

The “pygmy date palm” produced a date about as big as a bean.

The fig tree produced fruit but it was eaten by animals, squirrels probably.

“I am glad he is not supporting a food kitchen,” remarks Lytton John Musselman, a botany professor at Old Dominion and author of the plant dictionary. One problem, says the professor: Vero’s soil and climate aren’t like the Holy Land’s. “You can’t grow plants native to the semiarid Middle East in Florida.”

But the rabbi is undaunted. He wants the congregation to make its own matzo—unleavened bread—for Passover in April. That means planting what he refers to as “biblical wheat” over the coming weeks. A temple in South Portland, Maine, grew enough wheat to bake two loaves of challah.

Rabbi Birnholz bought the wheat seeds through a website, where various sites sell seeds to plant a biblical garden. He says he’ll be content to produce a single piece of matzo.

Scaling down ambition is key, says Vermont’s Mr. Hudson-Knapp. “Growing a biblical garden is like life,” he says. “When we get fixated on having it all turn out beautifully, it makes for a lot of frustration.”

By NANCY KEATES

Corey Arnold for The Wall Street Journal

STEVEN SMITH at his tea salon, Steven Smith Teamaker, in Portland, Ore.

Thomas Twining. Thomas Lipton. The Bigelows. And Steven Smith?

Hardly a household name, Mr. Smith is one of the biggest players in modern tea history, holding a key role in what’s been a renaissance in the U.S., with tea sales soaring to about $7 billion this past year from less than $1 billion in 1990. He’s responsible for many of the original blends for two top-shelf brands: Stash, now owned by the Japanese company Yamamotoyama; and Tazo, which Starbucks bought in 1999. His own company, Steven Smith Teamaker, sells small-batch teas in restaurants and stores like Williams-Sonoma, Zabar’s and even Eddie Bauer.

Quality leaves are essential to good tea, but so too are the expertise and imagination of the person creating the blends, said tea-expert James Norwood Pratt, author of the definitive “Tea Dictionary.” “In no generation in the past 5,000 years have we had more than a few people like Steven Smith. He makes astonishingly good blends,” Mr. Pratt said.

Since his start selling herbal botanicals from a health-food shop in the 1970s, Mr. Smith, 62, has honed his knowledge of what good tea leaves taste like. Over the years, he has traveled to India, Sri Lanka, China, Ethiopia, Egypt, Sumatra and South Africa, spending weeks in a region doing three tastings a day, with 200 cups per tasting.

Mr. Smith said that he picks a base—a black or a green leaf—and then thinks about flavors he has recently tasted or smelled that intrigue him. One tea, “Meadow,” with actual pink rose petals in its mix, was inspired by walking through the Portland Rose Garden in Portland, Ore., and smelling raspberries. Another that he created for Eddie Bauer includes dried Douglas fir needles to give a campfire taste. Intrigued by some bamboo growing outside his office, he’s tried adding bamboo leaves to a green tea and spicing it with ginger. He’s currently experimenting with aging teas in Pinot Noir and whiskey barrels: The teas absorb the moisture from the barrels and give off the alcohol’s scent.

Sometimes Mr. Smith tastes the ingredients individually and then mixes them with spoonfuls of tea, paying attention to how the look and smell changes when the tea is steeped, or infused in water. He writes down the formulas in a black notebook as he goes. Other times, when he’s on a plane or waiting in his car at a gas station, he comes up with the formulas in his head and writes them down, specifying how many grams or drops, without tasting them until they’re blended. He tries to avoid ingredients that taste and smell perfumed—oily and overly floral—and draws a distinction between herbs that taste “vegetative” and those that taste “brothy.”

Not all of his blends have been successful. After Starbucks bought Tazo, Mr. Smith stayed on for a few years. During that time he created a concentrated caramel tea latte formula that included very expensive teas from Darjeeling, India, and burnt-caramel sauce from a gourmet chocolate company in San Francisco. He said it tasted great, but when it shipped across the country the altitude caused the butterfat in the blend to clump, and Starbucks nixed it.

Born in Portland, Mr. Smith said that his strongest tea memory is drinking sweetened Red Rose at his grandmother’s after school, the whole house filled with the aroma. In high school he discovered chamomile tea in smoky, cool, dark coffeehouses. After three military tours in Vietnam and a stint at the natural-food store in Portland, he blended his first herbal tea in 1975 at Stash Tea, in which he was an early partner. “I learned as I went. It was a high-wire act,” he said.

At the back of Steven Smith Teamaker’s ivy-covered brick Portland tea salon is a blending room, or “lab,” with long metal tables and teapots. One teapot reads: “A Day Without Tea Is a Day Without Joy.” Mr. Smith said that’s true even on days when he tastes 200 teas of the same type made in the same week from the same region from a number of different producers. “It’s challenging to keep the taste buds engaged, but it keeps them sharpened,” he said.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com

BLENDING THE PERFECT CUP

MEASURE CAREFULLY | When he is making bottled tea blends, Steven Smith first steeps the tea and then combines the various liquids in beakers to get the desired flavor, aroma and color. This is the starting point that allows him to figure out the correct weight for the dry ingredients.

SCIENCE MATTERS | Mr. Smith uses a PH meter to make sure the acidity is at a safe-enough level to pasteurize bottled “ready-to-drink” teas without preservatives. Though he works from gut instinct, Mr. Smith also values precision in his work.

A TOUCH OF THIS, A TOUCH OF THAT | In addition to dry tea leaves, he uses concentrated ingredients to add a touch of color and natural acidity. This bottle contains concentrated hibiscus. Though that will add a small amount of flavor, most of a tea’s flavor comes from natural dried leaves and botanicals.

DON’T TASTE QUIETLY | When tasting, Mr. Smith uses a spoon so that he can place his nose over the tea as he slurps it. He makes a loud gargling noise, which allows him to get the most accurate aromas and flavors. It’s a process called “aspirating” and is similar to tasting coffee.

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

Los Angeles

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s decision to subtitle its ambitious Spencer Tracy retrospective “That Natural Thing” goes a long way toward explaining why this actor remains a potent screen presence almost 45 years after his death. Unlike other leading men, Tracy was not handsome or glamorous or exotic. He was, if anything, vanilla plain. Yet that seeming lack of distinction resonated with moviegoers from the Depression to the Vietnam era, and his squareness—at once earnest and wry—continues to appeal even now.

The 27-feature film retrospective pays roughly equal attention to Tracy’s early, middle and late period. The earliest movies are the least well known these days and therefore the most interesting to Tracy fans. Many are unavailable on home video and hard to find on TV. Not so the later films—like “Father of the Bride” (1950), “Inherit the Wind” (1960) and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967)—which may be overexposed. But even Tracy stalwarts, to say nothing of those somehow unfamiliar with his work, can benefit from seeing these pictures as they were intended: on the big screen.

UCLA Film & Television Archive

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in ‘Adam’s Rib’ (1949).

No other actor—except maybe France’s Jean Gabin, with whom Tracy is sometimes compared—combined skepticism and guilelessness so effectively. Tracy could appear gullible or even dim sometimes, though never for long. An inherent shrewdness always saved him in the end, regardless of the part.

On Feb. 15, UCLA screens “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941), which was not well received either critically or commercially on release. Nor was it a performance the actor himself liked. But while Tracy’s blandness as Dr. Jekyll continues to disappoint, his portrayal of the beast within comes as something of a revelation—especially in the torturous scenes where he abuses the barmaid Ivy (a particularly affecting Ingrid Bergman).

A double-bill on March 4 features the two films for which Tracy won Oscars: “Captains Courageous” (1937) and “Boys Town” (1938). In each, Tracy plays a father figure, perhaps his most recurring screen guise. The first, based on Rudyard Kipling’s novel, finds Tracy as a Portuguese fisherman who mentors a supercilious rich kid lost at sea (Freddie Bartholomew). The second casts Tracy as Father Flanagan, the moving force behind “Boys Town” and, in this context, the savior of a wayward Mickey Rooney.

The following week pairs two of the nine films that Tracy made with Katharine Hepburn, with whom he had a decades-long affair. “Keeper of the Flame” (1942) was their second picture and is now the most dated, being little more than a cinematic recruiting poster for the then-raging war against fascism. But the courtroom (and bedroom) comedy “Adam’s Rib” (1949) continues to tickle, with the leads in top form as rival lawyers married to each other.

Tracy and Hepburn’s last screen appearance together—the aforementioned “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”—was the actor’s final film, and whatever one thinks of its heavy-handed social consciousness, it aptly closes the series. But before “Dinner” come two of Tracy’s finest late-prime performances. “The Actress” (1953), screening March 16, is a winsome comedy by the actress and writer Ruth Gordon, loosely based on her youthful antics during the early part of the 20th century. Under George Cukor’s direction for a fourth and final time, Tracy plays a blustery paterfamilias whose strong-willed daughter (Jean Simmons) seeks a career on the stage, presumably against his wishes.

“Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), screening March 18, couldn’t be more different. It finds Tracy gravely serious in a film noir-cum-Western with a surprising racial twist. A strong supporting cast—Robert Ryan, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan and Lee Marvin—only heightens the appeal. It also presaged the “message movies” made for the producer-director Stanley Kramer that capped Tracy’s life in pictures.

Even a series this broad can’t fully limn Tracy’s prolific career. (He made more than 70 films.) Thus the terrific “Boom Town” (1940), with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, isn’t included, nor is the biopic “Edison, the Man” (also 1940). Some of the best Tracy and Hepburn outings, like “Woman of the Year” (1942) and “Pat and Mike” (1952), are also absent—as is Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), which earned Tracy his penultimate Oscar nomination.

Those unable to attend the UCLA screenings can take comfort knowing that Tracy’s most famous pictures are readily obtainable on DVD, the bulk from Warner Brothers. And many obscure titles have recently appeared in the company’s fecund video-on-demand line, Warner Archive.

Hepburn once compared Tracy to a baked potato. “A baked potato is pure,” she said. “It’s of the earth, and it’s dependable; that was Spencer.” The simile is unglamorous but true. Tracy was incredibly consistent as an actor. And though he rarely failed to bring something special to the screen, most of the time that something special was just being ordinary.

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film and classical music.

West Palm Beach, Fla.

It’s puzzling to watch a good play fall out of fashion. Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” was written in 1964, opened Off Broadway in 1970, wowed the New York critics, won a Pulitzer Prize, was turned into a movie by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in 1972 and looked like a deservedly sure thing in the posterity sweepstakes for many years thereafter. But while it continues to be performed by students and amateurs to this day, I’m not aware of any major professional staging that’s taken place in recent years.

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new production of “Gamma Rays” would be worthy of note for that reason alone. Fortunately, there’s a better reason to see it: William Hayes, the company’s artistic director, has given Mr. Zindel’s play the kind of revival of which every frustrated playwright dreams, one so profoundly comprehending and persuasively acted that you’ll leave the theater wondering how “Gamma Rays” could ever have been forgotten, however briefly. Enhancing the immediacy of the staging is the troupe’s unusually shallow 218-seat theater, whose last row of seats is only 34 feet from the stage. The handsome new venue, which opened in November, manages to preserve the striking intimacy of the fast-growing company’s old 84-seat performing space.

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much to “Gamma Rays.” It’s a one-set drama about the plight of a fatherless family teetering on the edge of abject poverty, a subject that has been done to death ever since “The Glass Menagerie” opened on Broadway in 1945. It has five characters, all of them women, one of whom has a bit part and one of whom never speaks, and it is dominated, as is customarily the case with such plays, by the unhappy mother, whose soul has been crushed by the struggle for survival. It is (mostly) told from the point of view of one of her children, a sensitive young girl who is clearly the author’s alter ego, and its tone alternates between delicate poetry and harsh realism.

You’ve heard it all before? Maybe—but not like this.

To be sure, Mr. Zindel’s plot is as simple as his premise. Tillie Hunsdorfer (Arielle Hoffman), the sensitive child, has been encouraged by one of her teachers to compete in a science fair, and she and Ruth (Skye Coyne), her older, epileptic sister, long desperately for Beatrice (Laura Turnbull), their mother, to come to the awards ceremony. But Beatrice, incapacitated by self-pity and drink, is no longer capable of summoning up any love for her children, and when they lose patience with her at last, she lashes out in a way that is shocking enough to make the audience gasp with horror.

Stock stuff, in other words, but Mr. Zindel has charged it with the kind of passionate feeling that can ennoble the least original of scripts, and no sooner does “Gamma Rays” get under way than you are drawn irresistibly into the Hunsdorfers’ unhappy lives. He also takes care to provide just enough hope to make the play bearable, though never so much as to undercut its hard-earned anguish. Why, then, did “Gamma Rays” slip into obscurity? Partly because Mr. Newman’s misbegotten film version was an orgy of overacting and partly, I suspect, because of the title, which makes sense in context but sounds irritatingly fey if you don’t know the plot. In addition, the script doesn’t read well: You have to hear the dialogue to appreciate how well it plays.

Above all, though, Beatrice must be played not as a blimplike monster of malice but as a life-size woman at the end of her frayed rope—and Ms. Turnbull delivers the goods. Never for a moment does her vicious bitterness smack of the stage. Her performance as Beatrice Hunsdorfer is as real as a hangover, and when she tells Tillie that “I hate the world,” you shudder at the thought of so complete and irreversible a loss of hope.

Ms. Hoffman, a high-school senior who is Ms. Turnbull’s real-life daughter, is more than equal to the challenge of playing a shy, mousy character without letting her become dull. Ms. Coyne’s part is flashier and thus easier, but she is every bit as credible as her colleagues. Gracie Connell is excellent in the small role of Tillie’s odiously smug competitor at the science fair, and Harriet Oser, who plays the Hunsdorfers’ senile boarder, is heart-catchingly memorable without saying a word.

Mr. Hayes’s chief contribution to the proceedings is to keep every element of the production, including the performances, in perfect equipoise. Nothing is exaggerated or disproportionate. He has also assembled a stellar production team led by Michael Amico, whose grimy storefront set reeks of what Ruth Gordon once called “the dark-brown taste of being poor,” and Sean Dolan, the lighting designer, who ends the play with a gorgeously well-calculated effect that sweeps the audience into and out of the Hunsdorfers’ dark world in a single evanescent flash of beauty. Rarely have I been so moved by a play, or so impressed by the company that produced it.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

By JULIE V. IOVINE

No one wants to hear the old saw “the more things change, the more things stay the same” as the impact of a catastrophic event. But in some ways the phrase summons what has happened in architecture since 9/11.

Ten years ago, it didn’t look that way. Far from it: The collapse of the World Trade Center towers generated impassioned public debate about the metaphorical and practical feasibility of tall towers, about icons and about the desirability of rebuilding at a site sanctified by tragic loss. Would tenants ever again want to work or live on very high, difficult-to-evacuate floors? Did icon equal target? Is it safe to be in public spaces? In July 2002, more than 4,000 people came to a town-hall meeting at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan to vent their feelings about architecture, urbanism and the need for quality when some shoe-box-bland massing studies were mistaken for Ground Zero design proposals.

Suddenly, good architecture and how it gets made was everywhere in the spotlight, with the design for Ground Zero making front-page news, architects discussing plans on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and even their persnickety attire closely observed in the style pages of fashion magazines. For months that intense public focus was pure adrenaline for architects, who saw it as the long-awaited summons to take their rightful seat at the table of powerbrokers who actually make the city happen. It was their chance of a lifetime to show that what architects do is of more consequence than prettifying boxes.

The moment didn’t last. Decision-making at the World Trade Center site bogged down in a mash-up of politics, bickering and compromise so messy that the public had little alternative but to tune out. That is to say, it was business as usual when it came to building at a major scale, with architects often serving as the pawns of larger forces.

Architects still talk about those limelight days of public attention wistfully, as a carousel-ride moment when the gold ring swept near and passed by.

Acrophobia, for instance, didn’t last a season. The competition to build tall, very tall, the tallest tower in the world is alive and well despite ample proof that 60 stories offer maximum efficiency and anything higher is pure braggadocio. The race has moved to Asia and the Middle East more for economic than psychological reasons. The 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center (now built up to the 80th of 104 stories) takes 16th place on the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s list of the future tallest towers in the world.

The latest to make a grab for first place was announced last month. The Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will be 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) high. As bluntly direct as it seems puerile, height remains integral to the confidence game among nations competing for dominance in a way that green roofs and recycling will never be. More to the point, like so many other supertalls around the world, the Kingdom Tower is being designed by American architects, Adrian Smith and Gill Gordon of Chicago.

Regarding safety in tall or iconic buildings, the fires that destroyed much of Wall Street in the 1830s had more visible impact on architecture than 9/11 did. They made fire escapes mandatory and ubiquitous, while the twin towers’ collapses triggered changes that are more invisible and procedural than overtly design-related. There is more redundancy in building to be sure—more stairs, more exits, more intercoms and, in special cases, much more concrete around the base. The emergency-exit stairs at One World Trade Center will debouch to the street rather than into the lobby to head off a mayhem collision of firefighters and panicking tenants. But installing exterior exits was a voluntary rather than a mandated decision.

Completely new to mainstream architecture is designing public spaces that are rigorously but invisibly secured. Once a matter for specialist engineers, security after 9/11 became a more general challenge in a much wider range of public spaces, from the entry areas of government buildings to those of financial institutions and even media companies. The Jersey barriers and bollards that sprouted everywhere overnight fast became eyesores demanding a keener design intelligence to make them seem to disappear. At least one firm became expert at devising subtle and visually pleasing alternatives for blocking passage. Few have probably been irked by or even noticed the circuitous bermed, granite walls leading up to the Washington Monument that ingeniously impede a head-on approach by vehicles. For the New York Stock Exchange, the firm Rogers Marvel Architects designed faceted bronze blocks of photogenic elegance that have become tourist stops in their own right. In July, the firm was awarded the commission to bring the principles of security design to the President’s Park, a public extension of the White House lawn. The design will elevate the entire ellipse to accommodate an antiram wall disguised as benches.

Is architecture different now, made better by the events of 9/11? Not really, because it remains impossible to anticipate the irrational. In some ways, it is far more likely that Hurricane Irene and other recurring storm hazards will force more visible changes to the built environment. The issues so urgently raised in the days right after 9/11 have turned out to have had less impact than anyone expected. What has remained strong, however, is the wish among architects to be allowed, even demanded, by the public to participate in shaping the city in ways more subtle and lasting than what can be seen on the skyline.

Ms. Iovine writes on architecture for the Journal.