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By JULIE V. IOVINE

East Hampton, N.Y.

In this town, where the year-round population of about 20,000 swells to more than 90,000 in the summer, civic engagement often revolves around residential issues. And so it is fitting that the new East Hampton Town Hall, dedicated in August, is not just a house, but an assemblage of four historic ones ranging in age from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. An impressive adaptive-reuse project, the New Old Town Hall, as some call it, is an apt reflection of the community’s identity and far more appropriate than the mean brick warehouse in which town officers had been working.

The four houses—actually two houses and two barns—are arrayed just beyond the town center, which is itself very domestic in scale and tone. They had belonged to long-residing grandees, Adelaide de Menil, the Schlumberger oil heiress, and her husband, Ted Carpenter—anthropologist, curator and author—who died in July. The couple had rescued the wood structures in the 1970s from various spots around East Hampton, and from advanced stages of dereliction, and arranged them in a livable ensemble on their own sprawling property. Then in 2007, as the couple prepared to sell their 40-acre enclave, Ms. de Menil offered the houses, barns and several other vernacular buildings to the town with a promise to pay for their removal as well as provide a $2 million endowment for their upkeep.

The selection of Robert A.M. Stern’s architecture firm to adapt them to civil service was certainly practical—Mr. Stern has lived in East Hampton for decades, and designed an addition to the town library and renovated the Guild Hall. But he is also the consummate American architect for residences of a certain pedigree; few understand so well how to bring the old up to contemporary snuff.

The design is straightforward. The largest of the four, Hedges House (Georgian, c. 1750), faces the street flanked by the two barns that are both set slightly back. The smaller Hand House (late 1800s, relocated from Amagansett by the couple) sits directly behind. It’s a tight composition that opens up, just as many retail operations in the area do, more welcomingly to the parking lot in the rear.

The space that the buildings hem in is enclosed by glass, a handy way to connect the set while preserving their individual identities and creating a handsome weatherproof courtyard. “The aim was to look like a farmstand on the side of the road,” said architect Randy Correll, the partner in charge of the project. A minivillage diorama is what it feels like, especially in the courtyard where exposed shingled exterior walls and original windows are so close that the town supervisor, whose office is in the Hedges House, need only cross the red brick courtyard to tap on the window of the Hand House and get the attention of the town counselors at their desks.

The large Bridgehampton Barn, with a sawn-pine frame typical of mid-19th-century English-style barns, was once the de Menil/Carpenter living room, and it translates easily—once a fireplace was replaced with glass exit doors and a sprinkler system was added—into a hall for town board meetings seating up to 85 people. The smaller, mid-18th-century Parsons Barn has a distinctive hewn-oak frame. It is the place to get fishing permits and marriage licenses—and to pick up a quick education in historic joinery: The 18th-century gunstock posts and exposed framing of hewn white oak put sheetrock and two-by-fours to shame. The architects discreetly added such modern essentials as an elevator, a light shaft for the lawyers toiling in the basement, and suspended ceiling lights. The feeling is acutely domestic as when standing by a fireplace in front of a receptionist’s desk but, in the same vein, also welcoming as few offices ever are.

Placing government offices in repurposed structures is nothing new in the Hamptons: East Hampton Village Hall is in a prerevolutionary Colonial that belonged to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, and last January the Town Hall of Southampton moved to a brick former high-school building. But in the town of East Hampton, the $1.5 million needed to complete the elegant and far from institutional $6.5 million Town Hall project set off a midconstruction controversy just as the town was coping with financial crisis.

The 1.5-mile move from the de Menil estate went off without a hitch. New foundations and mechanical systems for the buildings include a single expansive basement for the offices of the town attorneys and the budget department; they had been working out of trailers. But while construction was under way, a scandal over misappropriated funds led to a change in local government. Construction continued, but corners were cut to lower what were seen as excessive costs: Sustainable features such as radiant heating were dropped, along with plans to adapt two other barns. Even the architect’s furniture plan was abandoned in favor of more affordable pieces, such as plank-topped sawhorses for desks.

During a recent interview, Town Supervisor William Wilkinson, who was widely quoted while campaigning for the post saying that the compound might make a better J. Crew store, said, “The rehabilitation cost a lot of money for buildings that exist already. Sometimes I feel a little guilty at how opulent it all feels.” True, there are fireplaces (nonworking) and custom cabinets everywhere and the Shaker stair rails are exquisitely smooth. With less than 30 employees in the 15,000-square-foot complex, no one is crammed in as before (although the planning department is still holed up in rented condos). Far from an indulgence, however, the new old Town Hall looks every inch the part of East Hampton’s government home.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear.

Every piece of clothing has a story: There’s far more to a $155 polo shirt than a yard of fabric, four buttons and a length of thread.

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear. To begin, though, there is an actual KP MacLane—Katherine, who founded the brand with her husband, Jared MacLane.

The MacLanes met while working as sales managers at Hermès in Beverly Hills. They shared a fondness for polo shirts, and their closets were full of versions by Ralph Lauren, Hermès, Lacoste, J.Crew, Vineyard Vines and others. When they decided to move to Atlanta and launch an entrepreneurial venture last year, their minds went to those polos. “From the beginning, we knew we love classic pieces,” says Ms. MacLane. Mr. MacLane adds, “We want to take it to the next level.”

A notable facet of the fashion industry is that the barriers to entry are low. Etsy is full of items sewn in someone’s spare bedroom. Many big-name designers started small. Thakoon Panichgul sold his first collection from an upturned trash can in a lower-Manhattan warehouse, and Zac Posen sold his concept from his parents’ living room.

While that gives new entrants hope, it also creates a big risk. Stores are full of clothes from brands that disappear too quickly to recall. Standing out is a challenge.

Yet the MacLanes believed there was one shirt that hadn’t yet been made: a polo that could cross from sport to the office. Their concept would forgo a logo so the shirt could be dressed up with a blazer. The women’s version would have a slightly longer, more flattering sleeve and a lengthier buttoned placket.

“I just wanted to be able to see my jewelry and have it open without being too revealing,” says Ms. MacLane.

They planned to sell it the way they had sold luxury products—with attentive service and attractive packaging. They would sell online initially and wholesale to stores later. Products would launch individually, with a men’s polo next.

Reality hit when they started looking for a fine cotton fabric and mother-of-pearl buttons. “We knew from our experience at Hermès that the best fabrics come from France and Italy,” says Mr. MacLane. Yet it took six months to find a source for a soft, well-draped fabric that was free of potentially harmful dyes and finishing chemicals.

Cotton fabrics turned out to be stiffer and harder to dye than some blends, and the planned piqué weave looked too casual. Cotton prices soared in a global shortage last year. They settled on a cotton-modal blend (modal is a form of rayon) that offered a soft feel, attractive drape and absorbed color well. From a factory near Paris, it cost $6.80 a yard—less than the $9 a yard for cotton fabric but more than some $5-a-yard blends they had investigated.

Their plans for fine buttons changed as well. Mother-of-pearl cost $1 a button. Samples broke and chipped during wear and laundering. The MacLanes were using four buttons rather than two (three on the longer placket, plus an extra), raising the cost per shirt. They found a durable plastic button with a shell-like sheen for three cents each. “We’re calling this the practical approach to luxury,” Mr. MacLane says.

Finding a factory to sew the shirts was challenging. The MacLanes wanted to manufacture in the U.S. “There’s been a big shift to things that are made locally, and we wanted to be a part of that,” he says.

The first New York factory they approached refused to submit a bid. The owner believed they would take his patterns and samples and send them to China for production.

They found a willing Brooklyn factory and set to making samples. Planned grosgrain ribbon inside the hem made the “tennis tail”—a longer back shirttail for easy tucking—curl up. They substituted simpler cotton tape to reinforce the edge. Fully enclosed French seams, often used in men’s shirts, looked bulky with the stretchy fabric, so they chose a simpler “overlock” stitch that looked finished yet trim.

When picking packaging, they worried that boxes would become landfill waste. One afternoon, Ms. MacLane pulled out a laundry bag in which she was storing some scarves. It was from the Sea Island, Ga., hotel where the couple had been married. “She said, ‘Oh my God, how about if we sent a shirt in a laundry bag?’ And I was like, ‘That’s brilliant,’ ” Mr. MacLane recalls.

It took several iterations to get their logo—a colorful bird—stitched on the linen bag in the exact Pantone hues they’d selected. From their work at Hermès, they knew Vietnam has a reputation for producing great hand-embroidery, so they decided to make the bags, which cost $3, at a factory there. But they had to send samples back and forth to get the thread colors right.

The hang tags come from a printer outside of Atlanta, using string from a Texas firm.

Ultimately, the cost of materials and labor for each shirt added up to $29.57. This brought into sharp focus the cynicism of the New York factory owner who had predicted they would take his work to China. Factories in China, they found, would produce similar shirts—without the MacLanes’ choice of materials—for as little as $1 or $2.

Using standard industry markups, the MacLanes set the wholesale price for the women’s polo at $65 and the retail price at $155. (Retailers in the U.S. mark up wholesale prices of ready-to-wear by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 times.)

From those profits, the MacLanes pay themselves, cover marketing and overhead, invest in new-product development—and pay for shipping to customers, for whom ground shipping is free.

Finished shirts are sent to their home in Atlanta. There, they juggle caring for their 10-month-old son with fulfilling daily orders. “We knew how to fold,” Ms. MacLane says. “We’d both been at Hermès.”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com or follow her on Twitter: @BinkleyOnStyle

By HEIDI WALESON

New York

The Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle by Robert Lepage has been an uneasy mix of cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned representational staging. With “Siegfried,” the third opera, which opened on Thursday, Mr. Lepage and his team have finally married those elements, thanks in part to new techniques in 3-D imagery. Fire, waterfalls, a rocky mountaintop, a dense forest, even an underground view with slithering worms and skittering bugs, came vividly to life through Pedro Pires’s video images projected against the 24 moving planks of set designer Carl Fillion’s “machine.” There are still some showy transformations (four changes of position and video during the opera’s prelude, for example), but the set is more integrated into the action than it was in “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.” With François St-Aubin’s medieval-looking costumes and long-haired wigs on everyone, Mr. Lepage seems to be trying to give us the kind of realism that Wagner would have put on stage if he had had the technology a century and a half ago.

With the aid of Fabio Luisi’s detailed, balance-sensitive and brisk conducting, and a stellar cast of singers, this “Siegfried” moved away from the static awkwardness of Mr. Lepage’s “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” and presented a lively, propulsive, even comic account of the young Siegfried’s coming of age. Jay Hunter Morris, who took over the punishing title role just a week before the premiere, has a bright, pliant tenor—not large, but ringing and energetic. He brought an appealing goofiness, youthful impulsivity and bumptious self-confidence to Siegfried. His clashes with Gerhard Siegel’s penetrating Mime, grotesquely hunchbacked and absurd in the extremity of his fawning and malevolence, took on a broad, cartoonish humor that worked. So did his quick conquest of Fafner the dragon, who emerged from his cave as a yellow eyed, snaggle-toothed serpent, a caricature of a monster. In this opera, Siegfried’s opponents are easily bested by a young superhero with a magic sword.

Siegfried is on his way up; his grandfather Wotan is on his way down, and the superb, powerful Bryn Terfel gave the Wanderer mercurial flashes of humor and danger as well as moments of grand existential despair. In one of the production’s finest moments, the Wanderer walked to the very edge of a plank, which jutted out over the void like a rocky promontory, and called for the goddess Erda with the desperate, last-ditch ferocity of Lear howling on the heath. His subsequent exchange with Erda, the voluptuous-voiced Patricia Bardon, in a costume of black mirrors and a long white wig, had a potent, intimate chemistry (Wotan and Erda have a history), unusual in a scene that often plays as yet another boring recounting of “Ring” backstory by two bellowing singers. And his encounter with Siegfried, who breaks his staff and knocks him down, felt shocking despite its inevitability.

The theatricality of this “Siegfried” faded somewhat in the final scene, when Siegfried, having passed through the magic fire and several hours of serious singing, awakens Brünnhilde. Deborah Voigt sang with a steely intensity, and not surprisingly, she sounded fresher than Mr. Morris, but her wide-eyed Bride-of-Frankenstein look and a lack of warmth in her sound made this underdirected love scene, which should be climactic, fall flat. Also, Etienne Boucher’s mostly sensitive lighting set their encounter against a dark sky, an odd choice considering that the brilliance of the sun is mentioned more than once.

Eric Owens, looking like a demented Rastafarian in overalls and a long wig, was a growling, frustrated Alberich; Mojca Erdmann was a luminous Forest Bird, more substantial and resonant than the flickering green video image that represented her on stage, and Hans-Peter König was suitably lugubrious as Fafner.

After the rather gray, industrial look of the first two “Ring” operas, it was nice to get some color and texture into the action. I liked the worms, the waterfall that ran red after the killing of Fafner, the shadows of birds that swept across the bleak mountaintop. The video gave nature an organic part in the opera, and nature is certainly present in the music, from the groaning horns of the prelude to the transparent Forest Murmurs. Yet, unlike Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” in San Francisco, in which the degradation of nature is the production’s central theme, Mr. Lepage uses nature as illustration. The theme of his production, if there is one, still seems to be those moving planks, which creak audibly as they turn. But at least they had more to offer the storytelling in this installment of the tetralogy.

***

The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who was a sizzling Siegmund in the Met’s “Die Walküre” last spring and will headline the new “Faust” on Nov. 29, sang a recital at the opera house on Sunday afternoon. A 4,000-seat house is not ideal for the intimacy of Lieder, and Mr. Kaufmann seemed most at home in the more extroverted and operatic moments of his songs by Liszt, Mahler, Duparc and Strauss. Restraint was tougher: He had to work hard to produce soft high notes in the Liszt and Mahler, and to create the French sensuality of line in the Duparc pieces. His rich middle and low ranges were beautifully on display, however, and he brought a contemplative expressivity to the Strauss, especially the heartrending “Befreit.” Mr. Kaufmann loosened up a lot in his encores—four additional Strauss songs and the Lehar chestnut “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”—giving the audience a taste of the total performer who is so breathtaking when in character. Helmut Deutsch was the supportive and thoughtful pianist.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

San Francisco

This city climaxed a four-month celebration of five onetime Bay Area residents who settled in Paris—brothers Michael and Leo Stein; their sister, Gertrude; Michael’s wife, Sarah; and Gertrude’s life partner, Alice B. Toklas—with four performances earlier this month of “Four Saints in Three Acts.” Gertrude Stein wrote the nonsensical if occasionally droll libretto in 1929; Virgil Thomson penned the score, and got it produced in 1934. In the 1950s, Thomson cut “Four Saints” down to 45 minutes, and for the recent production in the Yerba Buena Center theater, director Brian Staufenbiel added “a more structured narrative” and dressed everyone but the leads in white. Nicole Paiement, the conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Parallèle, did a good job of conducting her 23-piece orchestra.

This version is set, more or less, in St. Teresa’s death-bedroom, with various saints gathered around her lacy, tented rolling bed; in an operating room (same bed, same room), in which St. Ignatius-as-surgeon, dressed in a scarlet suit, saws apart a dummy St. Teresa as the “real” one watches from above. The other saints toss the severed limbs about; Dr. Ignatius stitches them back together. Two characters (policemen?) in black start arresting people, which leads to a courtroom scene. All this has nothing to do with the original—but then the original didn’t have much to do with anything, either. Time is still found for a famous tango interlude and St. Ignatius’s line “Pigeons in the grass, alas,” which is repeated (with variations) by the other saints a dozen or two times. In fact, many words and lines are repeated over and over again. Thomson’s thin, unchallenging score manages to play some amusing games with Stein’s repeated words: Eclectic and melodious, it is never aggressively modern. The program was filled out by an inconsequential new work by Luciano Chessa, using lines Thomson had cut from “Four Saints.”

To learn more about the woman who came up with this mad libretto (and a great deal of similar quirky prose), one should spend a couple of hours at Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. Here curators Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer have put together “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.” It is doubtful anyone will ever really understand Stein, but in this extensive exhibition the curators have provided us with all the clues we could ask for: recordings of her reading and talking; film clips of her theater pieces; clothing, jewelry, furniture and wallpaper; more paintings and sculptures of her; many more photographs. “Gertrude Stein became one of the most painted, sculpted and photographed women of the twentieth century,” we are told. The judicious catalog—defensive, but not worshipful (it cannily avoids talking about her writing)—may be the most candid, thoughtful and extensive biography she will ever get.

Just around the corner from the Jewish Museum, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the centerpiece of this summer’s Steinfest, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” curated by Janet Bishop and others.

For several years, almost the only places in Paris where one could go to see collections of works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were Gertrude and Leo’s (and later Alice’s) weekly Saturday-evening salons on rue de Fleurus, and Sarah and Michael’s the same evening on the rue Madame. Eventually, “everybody” came—writers, musicians, cafe society and the gay demimonde, foreign searchers after the new, and the artists the Steins collected.

The main attraction of the SFMOMA show are the 76 Matisses and 47 Picassos the Steins once owned (the works and numbers will differ slightly when the show travels to Paris and New York). In addition to an impressive number of masterpieces, the exhibition includes the minor works one should expect of a family of emigré Californians of comfortable but not unlimited means—as well as family snapshots, letters, documents, furniture, house plans and home movies. There are 204 works of art here, filling most of the museum’s fourth floor.

The experience of standing before Picasso’s small, dark-eyed “Self Portrait”; his hulking, immortalized image of Gertrude Stein (which she gave to the Met to help ensure her immortality); his ethereal “Boy Leading a Horse” (on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, and one of the greatest modern paintings); and Matisse’s dazzling “Woman With a Hat” (from SFMOMA’s permanent collection)—all in a row, all painted and purchased in 1905-06—makes passing through galleries of lesser works worthwhile.

In Room I, an erotic Bonnard and a Renoir nude are joined by a small Manet and four Cézannes (two of them lithographs). Room III includes the great row of four mentioned above. Room IV has a corner of fine melancholy rose- and blue-period Picassos, as well as a long wall of 11 Matisses in all the wrong colors and his knobbly bronze “Serf.” In Room VI, feast on Matisse’s “The Girl With Green Eyes” of 1908, bought that year by Michael Stein for a friend who eventually gave it to SFMOMA. Next come Matisse’s jarring “Blue Nude” painting (now part of the Cone Collection in the Baltimore Museum of Art) and the bronze “Reclining Nude” that mimics her pose. There follows a compelling suite of five of Picasso’s sharp, orange watercolor sketches for a woman’s almond-shaped, huge-eyed head—plus a larger version in oil—which was to turn up later that year atop one of his Demoiselles d’Avignon.

There are more of Picasso’s early Cubist adventures in the next two rooms. Gertrude was willing to embrace these new works, while Leo was not—which (along with Alice’s growing role in the household) led to the siblings’, and the collection’s, split in 1914. Further along are Matisse’s handsome, stylized portraits of his good friends Michael and Sarah, donated to SFMOMA in 1955. Michael and Sarah returned to the Bay Area in 1935. Before they died—short of cash—they were able to sell many of their Matisses to good friends, who then gave the works to the San Francisco museum, where they form the core of its early-modern collection today.

Back in 1904, Leo and Gertrude, just settled in Paris, learned that they had a legacy of $8,000—perhaps $200,000 today. Almost immediately, Leo, the family art expert, went out and bought a Gauguin, a Cézanne and two Renoirs. In 1905 he bought their greatest Cézanne—”The Artist’s Wife With a Fan” (1878-88), now in the Buehrle Foundation in Zurich (which, alas, does not lend its works)—and a Delacroix, as well as their first important works by Matisse and Picasso, virtually wet from the canvas. In rapid succession came Bonnard, Daumier, Manguin, a fine Toulouse-Lautrec, Valladon, more and more and more Picassos and Matisses.

How did this family—along with very few other people—recognize the importance of so many defiantly rule-breaking paintings by artists still derided or ignored by the Salons, museums and major galleries and collectors? Who among us today could make such a brilliant gamble on the future of art with just $200,000 to spend? Such is the mystery of changing tastes and the enduring fascination of the Steins.

Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal on West Coast events.

By CAMMY BROTHERS

London

What was radical architecture before it was chic? At a time in which the mantle of the avant-garde has been inherited by architects such as Rem Koolhaas (designer for Prada and the Chinese government) or by Zaha Hadid (architect for Moammar Gadhafi before his fall), it is worth remembering what revolutionary architecture meant when it was more than an attitude.

ullstein bild / The Granger Collection

An early 1920s model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, with its three rotating levels. A 33-foot-tall scale version of the tower has been constructed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy.

For a brief, utopian moment in early 20th-century Russia, artists and architects together sought to forge an abstract language of form suited to the politics of the new state. Vladimir Tatlin’s famous model for a Monument to the Third International—envisioned in 1920 as a 1,300-foot-tall ziggurat-like tower rotating on three levels—embodied the visionary, futurist aesthetics and idealism of the movement. The commitment to abstraction and the sense of shared purpose between painters and architects paralleled that of the Bauhaus, and in fact some of its members traveled to Moscow. Yet while the Bauhaus is enshrined in the history of European architecture and modernism, the Russians are often sidelined, and only a few protagonists—such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky—are widely known by nonspecialists.

“Building the Revolution: Soviet Art & Architecture 1915-1935,” a small exhibition now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, conveys the electric energy and genuine radicalism of the works created during this period. Architecture shows are notoriously difficult: The building itself isn’t there, models can be clunky, and architectural drawings are hard for the uninitiated to read. But here large, color photographs by Richard Pare, executed over 15 years, show Russian avant-garde architecture in various states of use and disuse, shininess and dullness, and demonstrate that an architecture exhibit can be a beautiful thing to behold. Implicitly, the photographs of the decaying state of many of the buildings are their own powerful polemic about the need to preserve this vital but often undervalued heritage. Interspersed with Mr. Pare’s images are photographs and texts of the period, as well as drawings, paintings and collages. And enticing audiences into the show is a 33-foot-tall scale model of Tatlin’s monument, constructed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy and standing in stark contrast to its stately Palladian architecture.

The show brings several fascinating and timely aspects of the period into sharp focus. While many young designers and students are now seeking to expand what they see as the traditional purview of the profession—making beautiful houses and offices for the rich and powerful—the show serves as a reminder that their utopian view of the purpose and audience of architecture is by no means new. The architects of revolutionary Russia could rely, however, on a phenomenon almost unknown today: large-scale public financing of monumental architecture. This is of course a longstanding tradition—even Roman emperors built public baths to garner popular favor—but one that has virtually disappeared. Thus contemporary architects such as Shigeru Ban, Bryan Bell (in the tradition of Samuel Mockbee), Anselmo Canfora, Teddy Cruz, Walter Hood, Sergio Palleroni and Cameron Sinclair have sought to side-step this problem by seeking patronage elsewhere: among the communities they hope to serve.

In light of these new efforts, it is useful to witness the idealism with which the much-blighted concept of social housing was conceived. Certainly many of these buildings have fallen into disuse and neglect, but the exhibit reminds us of the hopeful spirit in which they were created, and of their beauty. A structure such as the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis in 1930, remains a poetic embodiment of rigorous geometric principles combined with moments of experimentation. The building’s social agenda—creating spaces that would encourage traditional families to move toward communal living—was advanced not at the expense of aesthetics, but in concert with it. The building illustrates the close dialogue between Russian and European Modernists: Taking up Le Corbusier’s principles, it was elevated on pilotis, had banded fenestration and a roof garden. Le Corbusier didn’t have a chance to bring these ideas to fruition until he built the Unité d’habitation in Marseille more than 15 years later, a building that shows his careful observation of Ginzburg’s design.

Despite these close ties to European Modernism, building conditions in Russia remained stubbornly rooted in the past: In a fascinating interview in the exhibition catalog, Mr. Pare describes how the unavailability of new materials forced architects to imitate the appearance of steel while using traditional wood construction methods.

Another compelling aspect of the show is its demonstration of the engagement of painters in architecture, theater design, graphics and so forth. Calling themselves ZhivSkuptArch (painting-sculpture-architecture), artists and architects sought to create works that transcended these traditional categories. A gorgeous set of studies by Ivan Kudriashev for the decoration of the First Soviet Theatre in Orenburg, from 1920, conveys the convergence of spatially conceived paintings and architecture conceived in geometric planes. They suggest a dynamic movement through space through a remarkably simple palette of shapes and colors.

Ultimately, the exhibition asks: Is the idea of utopian architecture an impossible paradox? The short life of this exciting, experimental moment—which would soon collapse into Stalinism and the repressive expectations of social realism—suggests the precarious nature of a state-sponsored avant-garde.

The relation between aesthetics and politics, or the ideology of style, remains a puzzle. The most visible legacy of this period today is in the sleek, geometric aesthetic of Ms. Hadid, who by her own account draws inspiration from the work of Malevich and El Lissitsky, but whose projects include works for patrons ranging from King Abdullah to Eli and Edythe Broad. What does it mean for an architect to adopt the aesthetics of early 20th-century Russia and the politics of Switzerland?

Make what you will of Marxism, this was a historical moment when ideas mattered, and when geometrical abstraction was the new universal language. Architecture today is personality driven, participating in the competitive logic of the market, fueled by rivalry, intensely professionalized and most often serving private clients. The exhibit is an instructive reminder that creativity can also thrive collectively, in dialogue with art, and in service of shared goals.

Ms. Brothers is an associate professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture” (Yale).

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

For decades, the judges on television courtroom dramas and police procedurals were adjudicating enigmas. From “Perry Mason” to the capacious “Law & Order” franchise, they did a bit of overruling here, a little sustaining there, demanded order as needed and, at the climactic moment, called for the verdict. What did these blank-faced, black-robed benchwarmers think? About anything? Now, there was a case worth cracking.

“Growing up watching ‘Perry Mason,’ I can’t remember many of the judges doing more than ruling on evidentiary issues. You didn’t feel you knew them at all. But on modern TV you do get a peek behind the veil,” said David E. Kelley, who was one of the first to lift that veil as the creator of shows like “The Practice” and “Boston Legal.”

The former featured the sexually rapacious Roberta Kittleson (played by Holland Taylor) who skillfully and unrepentantly seduced her law clerk, made advances to litigants, and ordered those who displeased her to go stand in the corner—all while making impeccable legal rulings. The latter included Clark Brown (Henry Gibson) who—so much for judicial restraint—reacted to witness testimony with commentary like “shocking,” “disgusting” and “outrageous.”

But in exposing judicial tics, quirks, bluntly stated biases and ethical failings, “The Good Wife,” now in its third season, sets a benchmark. Witness Judge Richard Cuesta (David Paymer), who has no tolerance for being interrupted and even less for naughty language—those who appear before him must substitute the word “fluff” for profanity. And witness Judge Charles Abernathy (Denis O’Hare), a committed blood donor and a committed liberal—but, he wants you to know, fair-minded—who’s convinced that lawyers are less likely to be at each other’s throats when seated and leaning back in their chairs.

There’s also Judge Lee Sutman (Chip Zien), who reminds lawyers that “unless I point to you, you do not speak”; Judge Felix Afterman (Jerry Stiller), who frequently nods off in court and tries to disguise his snoozes as time when he’s “thinking”; and Judge Patrice Lessner (Ana Gasteyer), who insists that lawyers preface every statement with “In my opinion” to make it plain that such statements are in no way to be construed as facts.

Robert and Michelle King, the husband-and-wife creators of “The Good Wife,” had long viewed TV judges as untapped sources of drama, conflict and surprise, pointing, as a model, to 1959′s “Anatomy of a Murder,” the big-screen adaptation of a novel by a Michigan state supreme-court justice, John Voelker. “There was a sense of the judge [played by Joseph McCarthy's nemesis Joseph Welch] having a personality, and having likes, dislikes and interests,” Mr. King said.

The Kings had also chafed at the fusty tropes of legal dramas, chief among them witnesses breaking down on the stand—file under Mason, Perry—and the passionate closing argument that saves the day and saves the defendant’s bacon.

“There’s a certain rhythm in courtroom dramas, and that rhythm usually involved it being a debate between two sides—the prosecution and the defense,” said Mr. King. “Then the authority, the judge, comes in and offers a binary answer, either yes or no. We wanted to make the usual strategic moves in court more complex by adding a third side, a judge who would have quirks and biases so the chess game was never two-sided. The players—the lawyers—would have to take into account a referee who every now and then flicks a chess piece from the board.”

What followed from this thinking, Mr. King continued, “was that the judges should be interesting in their own right: unpredictable, real and far from omniscient.” Even a little zany, if perhaps not in the same league as the jurists on the comedy “Night Court” and the comedy-drama “Ally McBeal.” “At a certain point courtroom drama grinds down into tedium,” Mr. King said. “One of the ways to avoid that is comedy.”

The complicated, complicating judges have made the courtroom scenes livelier. They’ve also made for a nice thematic fit. “‘The Good Wife’ is about things coming at Alicia from all sides,” said Ms. King, referring to the often beleaguered title character (Julianna Margulies), who goes to work as an associate at a large law firm to support her children after her politician husband (Chris Noth) is jailed in the wake of a sex and corruption scandal. The unpredictable judge is “yet one more side that something can come at her from.”

Giving judges more dimension and more face time doesn’t mean they’re ready for their own series, however, though the USA network’s “Fairly Legal” has a mediator as its central character. “It would be difficult because they’re decision makers in the course of the trial but you can’t involve them in a case to the same extent you can involve a lawyer,” said Mr. Kelley, whose legal drama “Harry’s Law,” now in its second season, uses judges sparingly.

“In 41 minutes, sometimes it’s all you can do to service your main characters and you don’t have time for the judges,” he added. “Sometimes my scripts run to 70 pages because I’ve given the judge a bit to do. When you have to get tough and edit the script, sometimes it’s the judge’s material that goes.”

Robert and Michelle King have a friend on the bench who would be happy to have some of their judges’ material go as well. “He thinks some of what we do is flamboyant and shows a little disrespect for a judge’s authority,” said Mr. King, who concedes that “The Good Wife” “went a little broad” in the middle of the second season, and that it’s time, perhaps, to pull back a bit.

“Of course, TV shows deal with the extreme,” he said, “because that’s most entertaining.”

Ms. Kaufman writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Norfolk, Va.

Travelers passing through Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990 could hardly avoid Eastman Kodak’s “Colorama” advertisements. Piercing the gloom of the station’s cavernous main hall like stained-glass windows that promised a better life here on earth, these backlighted transparencies were scaled to compete with outdoor billboards in Times Square. Measuring 18 feet high and 60 feet across, they were promoted as the world’s largest photographs. Every day for 40 years, more than half-a-million viewers could look up and bask in these colossal testaments to American plenty and pulchritude.

“Colorama,” at the Chrysler Museum of Art, revisits this influential campaign and asks us to appreciate the photographs as feats of engineering and propaganda. A total of 565 Coloramas were made, but none have survived intact. The 36 panoramic prints in four rooms here, scanned from negatives at the George Eastman House, which organized this traveling show, are as close as the under-30 generation will ever come to the glowing force of the originals.

Even at 1/12th the size that they were in Grand Central Terminal, these are knock-out examples of color photography. Kodak had the financial resources to lure prime talent. Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas and Eliot Porter accepted the challenge of making images that could be read quickly by passing crowds.

No locale was too exotic to send a photographer and a crew. It was not excessive to spend a week underwater waiting for the fish to cooperate. Retouching and assembly took even longer. As it was not possible to manufacture enormous single sheets of film, each image was a sort of celluloid tapestry, made from 41 strips of positive transparencies (later versions used only 20), made on special enlargers in Rochester, N.Y., each piece stretched across a frame and hooked tautly in place over the station floor. Illuminated by a mile of tubing, they were like slides for a Brobdingnagian projector.

A new ad went up on the wall every three weeks, but the message never varied: Kodak color film could make a perfect moment out of anyone’s drab existence. In retrospect, it was shrewd but cruel that harried commuters had to walk under photographs of fellow Americans who seemed to have endless horizons of leisure time.

To prevent ambiguities from disrupting the intended meaning—a notorious problem with snapshots—each image was as tightly crafted and relentlessly wholesome as Walt Disney’s movies or Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers. (Indeed, Kodak enlisted Rockwell’s directorial skills for at least one Colorama, an elaborate scenario of a family’s “chaotic” departure on vacation in their station wagon.)

Genial subject matter was doubly effective if it presented opportunities to showcase the film’s ability to capture saturated primary colors. Photographs in the Chrysler Museum’s first room include one of a couple at the Bronx Botanical Gardens (now known as the New York Botanical Garden) as tulips are blossoming and another of pink-skinned contestants at an America’s Junior Miss Pageant.

Later rooms (and examples in a 25-minute video on the history of the genre) feature scenes of family togetherness at the dinner table and around a backyard swimming pool, arrays of puppies and kittens and babies, travel scenes from Portugal and Peru, snow and water sports, and a discotheque full of clean-cut frugers.

Adams, represented here with a golden-hued tableau of an Oregon wheat harvest, once called Coloramas “aesthetically inconsequential but technically remarkable,” an accurate judgment during the 1950s but one that did not anticipate their impact on a generation more attuned to camp than his own.

Created in an era before corporate advertising realized the benefits of mocking itself, these photographs were designed with the utmost sincerity, their absence of irony making them seem over time to be only richer in that quality.

With 40 years to choose from, the George Eastman House curators, Jessica Johnston and Alison Nordström, have taken only a thin slice. Almost all their examples were made in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when assassinations, riots, the Vietnam War, student protests and other social upheavals were roiling the body politic.

Not a trace of these developments can be seen in the smiling and homogenous world on display here. African-Americans did not appear in a Colorama until 1969, and many ethnic groups hardly registered at all. The country glorified by Kodak here not only is no more, this show submits that it never was.

Art photographers since the early ’80s have emulated the controlled approach taken by the photographers employed in this campaign. The images of Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson have more in common with Rockwell’s illustrations than with Robert Frank’s street photography.

The self-referential aspect of the Coloramas—almost all of the stagings included someone in a group taking a photograph—feels eerily contemporary. A Kodak mother here photographing her daughter playing with her dollhouse could be a work by Laurie Simmons; it lacks only the feminist quotation marks. Jeff Wall laces his fabricated images with nods to modernist and premodernist painting. But the cinematic grandeur of his light boxes owes as much to the materials of the Coloramas as to Marxist art theory.

The campaign ended in 1990 when Grand Central Terminal was restored to a less cluttered state. The farewell image combined a huge red apple beside the World Trade Center towers. If these sad ironies were not enough, this exhibition trades on affection for Eastman Kodak as the company is fighting to survive in the digital economy. The optimism depicted in the Coloramas may have been a sham; what they represented for a once-dominant company was not.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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 PAUL LEVY

LONDON—Did Oliver Goldsmith, as a schoolboy in mid-18th-century Ireland, really fall for the prank of being directed to the grand house of the local landowner, when he had asked directions to the best inn? And was Squire Featherstone really more amused than enraged at being ordered about in his own house?

True or not, the 40-something playwright turned the story to good account in his perfectly constructed 1773 comedy “She Stoops to Conquer,” adding to it plots dealing with the arranged marriages of the eligible girls in the old-fashioned country house. The National Theatre’s new production, directed by Jamie Lloyd and sumptuously designed by Mark Thompson, incorporates scholarship that makes clear how daring it was in its day. The London stage then featured, says Michael Caines’s program essay, “sentimental comedy,” a hybrid of tragedy in an urban domestic setting, while Goldsmith called his play a “laughing comedy.”

Contemporary critics turned up their noses at the colloquial speech used by the lower orders. If they didn’t like to hear the servants speaking in country dialect, what would they make of the local-yokel accents of Squire (Steve Pemberton) and Mrs. Hardcastle (uproariously played by Sophie Thompson) and her son, Tony Lumpkin (David Fynn), who here demonstrates the manners of his class by scratching his crotch with his half-eaten chicken leg?

The role of the daughter is difficult, because she has both to be herself and pretend to be a barmaid, and remember when she is which—but Katherine Kelly does it with aplomb. Yet comic honors belong to the gullible, inn-seeking suitors, Harry Hadden-Paton and John Heffernan, for perfecting the tics Monty Python taught us to love.

It’s a small pity that the fa-la-la vocalise of the whole company isn’t musically better, but it serves its purpose of getting the characters on and off stage in this raucously enjoyable evening.

Until April 14; broadcast in 800
cinemas world-wide on March 29

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Write to Paul Levy at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

Apart from the beautiful horses, racing can be an ugly business, and because of the beautiful horses no sport is more heartbreaking. So be warned: HBO’s addictive new drama, set at and around the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles, is designed to pull you into this tortured world and hold you there until you see the light. It’s hard to look away.

The cast is large and the show drops us into the stream of each character’s life without much explanation. Go with the flow until it begins to make sense. It will.

One main story revolves around “Ace” Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), a crime boss just out of prison; his chauffeur of many talents, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina); and the Irish-bred horse Ace has stabled at the track with trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz).

Ace is bent on revenge against former associates, and his plan includes an investment in the track. The rest is left murky, however, so that when Ace hires the young financial whiz Nathan Israel (Patrick J. Adams), we cannot anticipate the young man’s real purpose in the story. Ditto the shy woman (Joan Allen) looking to start a center where prison inmates help rehabilitate sick or injured horses. Is that all she is?

The other central character in “Luck” is trainer-owner and breeder Walter Smith (Nick Nolte), who has poured all his hope and plenty of fear into a big, fast colt who is linked to Smith’s clouded past. This is a great role for Mr. Nolte, who gets to put a different spin on a character he portrayed in the movie “Affliction” and show us a battered man whose soul and capacity for love, or at least kindness, are still intact.

But the glory of “Luck” is that almost everyone in it has dramatic appeal. Usually, this is because we can see into their hearts. Take the novice jockey Leon. Played by Tom Payne, he’s a gentle innocent whose happiness only requires the opportunity to ride. Yet nature has given him a body that is bigger than it should be. The agony of his weight-loss running sessions in the California sun is so pitiable that it plays like tragedy.

On the upside is cheerful Rosie (Kerry Condon), an Irish workout rider who has a magical rapport with horses but is still struggling to get mounts as a race jockey. Her grace even in disappointment is more touching because her competition for a coveted job is Ronnie (real star jockey Gary Stevens), an alcoholic and drug-snorting former champ now trying to make a comeback.

Racing is still a man’s world, and track veterinarian Jo (Jill Hennessy) must be strong to stay honest in a business where a lot of people will do anything for an edge. Her job also means delivering bad news, a constant reality in thoroughbred racing, about a horse’s health. Jo is so tough, in fact, that when she does cry, we can hardly watch. And then there is jockeys-agent Joey, played to perfection by Richard Kind as a Pagliacci whose depression makes him seem pathetic but also sinister.

One of the series’ most remarkable achievements comes with the four characters who function as racing’s typical degenerate gamblers. Four men who live for the track, for the bet, and without hope of escape from the degrading boom and mostly bust nature of their addiction. At first, they appear in broad outline: the bitter and mean wheelchair-bound Marcus; the excitable and slow-witted Renzo; the ambitious and frustrated Lonnie; and the formerly handsome Jerry (Jason Gedrick), a masterful handicapper whose gambling addiction is terrible to behold.

As “Luck” progresses, however, this bedraggled gang, almost Shakespearean in its dramatic form and function, reveals a key to the entire series. The revelation begins when the men, watching a race, see an unfamiliar horse gallop to the finish with the strides and speed of a true champion. Such an animal is the miracle, the holy grail of the sport. All at once, the hard-core gamblers smile, their ravaged faces transformed by the joy of the moment. Watching a thing of beauty, able to appreciate its majesty, they themselves look beautiful.

There are many more moments of humanity discovered or restored in “Luck.” The most bizarre incident involves a suicide attempt gone wrong that rekindles a lust for life in a person who barely seemed worth saving. In another instance, a man compelled to commit murder signals regret with a redemptive flicker of his eyes.

There is much in this series that is gorgeous, like the sight of steam rising from a horse’s back while it is being soaped and washed after an early morning workout. There is a lot that is not pretty. After one scene of stunning violence, the possibility of more can’t be forgotten.

Strong writing and acting ensure that we soon become so sensitive to the characters that we feel for them the way they feel for their horses. This is a predictably searing experience in a venue like racing, where big dreams must usually be followed by crushing disappointment. When Nick Nolte’s character is watching his beloved colt run, Mr. Nolte’s body rises and sinks with the rhythm of its hoofbeats, and we are moved by the sight but filled with worry.

Yet most everybody keeps going. They rise every morning and, as one gamblers says, “step up to the plate” in the hope that one day will be better than the last. That is what “Luck” is really about. When all is said and done, the series is an invitation to play the game of life.

***

Take five perky and pink-clad sorority sisters from America (think “Legally Blonde”). Send them to England to recruit members of the first-ever sorority in the U.K. from among the denizens of a grimy industrial city and…. “Sorority Girls” is what reality television was made for. The setting helped guarantee a number of applicants with inelegant accents, heavy makeup and hard-drinking habits. Leeds is a site of the proverbial 19th-century dark, satanic mills of “Chariots of Fire” fame.

As rush interviews begin, the Americans can barely conceal their horror, for instance when a prospective new member of Sigma Gamma turns out to be a human pin cushion, with piercings on one hip, two nipples and various other parts. But they give other applicants high marks for trying: “Normally I’m not a fan of someone’s bra showing,” one American sister says. “But hers was cute and it did match her shirt.”