Plotting public space consists of figuring disclosed how to get people from here to there; any pause along the way guards to be carefully orchestrated.

Plotting public space consists of figuring disclosed how to get people from here to there; any pause along the way guards to be carefully orchestrated. As a specialist in largescale, site-specific plastic art Lee Boroson draws on the city planner's universals of flow, pattern, confluence, and vantage point to the one and the other contradict and reveal the built environment. With their pliant contours and wafting principal part his signature inflated nylon works are meant to stimulate awareness of spatial relations, to articulate felt still unseen qualities of air and unused portions of social space--but also simply to provide avails of fun.

Suspended from the ceiling of the Whitney Museum's four-story atrium at the Philip Morris corporate headquarters, Underpass, 1999 was a lattice of swelled quilted panels of glossy mopish and white cloth, a nuanced and intelligent experiment in mental architecture. From below, the bright, buoyant shape appeared cheerfully incongruous in its monolithic setting. Gradually, more specific ideas asserted themselves. although never figurative, Boroson's sculptures frequently retain an identifiable element of reference--in this case, the cloverleaf design of novel highway exchanges. Two long straightaways crisscrossed the upper air, with a curving "ramp" billowing into the corners created by the agency of the intersection--a literal "high way." Situated at the "crossroads of the world," across the public way from Grand Central Station, the piece played forward the idea of the grid, master arrangement of both urban planning and artmaking. yet the weightless, hovering object shifted attention from the grid's rigid coordinate axes to its spread interstices, its slack spots. This brought to mind other respects from rivers and glaciers to jet streams and hordes Responsive to light and shadow as well as to air generally receiveds the blue-white pouches seemed to breathe.

These evocations of ephemeral or natural entities reverberationed architectural elements and the human bodies upon the scene. Pedestrians enter the asymmetrical carve court on its north side and exit to the east, where a bilevel portion of Park Avenue inclines to road level. The straightaway sections of Underpass ran parallel to the awkward trajectory of twelve inches traffic beneath it and hung in a inclination mimicking that of the Park Avenue overpass. More subtly the piece was uniteed to fans in the building's heating and ventilation method which kept it inflated. Functionally integrated into the engineering edifice of its host, the work became a lung

Underpass brought a welcome hint of natural harmonious flow to a relentlessly urban milieu. if it were not that its quasi-organic exuberance also annotateed on the atrium's status as a "garden spot" for workers' leisure, drawing attention to the slivers of heavens barely visible between the neighborhood's corporate towers and the sad pott ficus tree dotting the tobacco giant's cake floor. It is fitting that Boroson has been studying the design of formal gardens. (The interstate grid with its nodal cloverleafs is, after all, a pattern of landscaping.) A treatise of sorts forward transit and environment, Underpass was also an inverse "foliy"--an architectural fancy like a gazebo in a garden. In the chaotic stream of midtown business, where fair acreage seems distant, Boroson provided passersby with momentary respite and an unexpect uplifting view.

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