JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006).

LIKE everything else that Murray Moss does, the auction he curated for Phillips de Pury & Company, “Moss, the Auction: Dialogues Between Art and Design,” is highly subjective and personal. Mr. Moss has a fraternal twin (a sister, Fern Moss Kalai) and has always had an interest in genetics

Here are some lots from the auction, which pairs design objects (some from his private collection that he owns with Franklin Getchell) with art from various collectors.

The auction is on Oct. 16; the viewing starts on Saturday at the Phillips uptown location, 450 Park Avenue.

Pandamonium

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006) and “Composition” by Henri Michaux (1959). “A variation of a Rorschach test?” Mr. Moss wonders in the catalog.

Lounge Act

Velvet Sofa by Mattia Bonetti (2002) and “Rosa Nackte (Red Nude)” by Luciano Castelli (1982). “Doesn’t the velvet-skinned sofa suggest the elongated, welcoming lap of the sleeping red Siren?” Mr. Moss muses. “Couldn’t each be a portrait of the other?”

By BOB MORRIS

APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the V&A, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

I might have been better off without it. En route to displays like a collection of smartly sustainable wood chairs by Royal College of Art students and one of courtyard benches commissioned from international designers by the British company Established & Sons, I stopped at exhibits of wrought-iron ornaments, Elizabethan miniatures and Buddhist shrines. Imagine what I would have seen without any direction.

And so it was throughout London: even if the festival fare was hard to find or disappointing, you were sure to stumble on something else worth looking at. A daylong conference called the Global Design Forum, for instance, was a slog (most presenters were limited to an awkward 10 minutes, too short or too long, depending on the speaker).

But attendees could marvel at the construction zone known as the King’s Cross neighborhood and admire the new campus of Central Saint Martins art school, where the forum was held. This proto-Brutalist building, converted from an 1851 granary, had a sea of end-grain wood flooring and a foyer where an Airstream trailer was inconspicuously parked.

More often, though, the setting was a bonus rather than compensation.

Secreted in the basement of a mews house in a pop-up neighborhood called the Brompton Design District was a show of sneaky objects by several Britain-based designers. Paul Elliman fashioned a collection of mineral specimens from discarded materials like plastic pen pieces (“quartz”) and metallic plastic bags (“pyrite”). And Sam Jacob cast a basketball in terra cotta to look something like an artifact from an Etruscan pickup game.

You might call such works deceptive. The designers called them placebos. “A placebo is an inert object that looks like it works,” said Tetsuo Mukai, of Study O Portable, which had smeared sheets of glass with cinnabar, malachite and azurite (the ancient religious painter’s sources of red, green and blue) to create a modern triptych. The work, titled “RGB,” evoked the altar of the media screen.

East of Brompton, in a 120,000-square-foot decommissioned postal sorting office, the trade show Design Junction presented the festival’s most efficient concentration of talent. Here, among clusters of well-groomed furniture and lighting (including impressive variations on the Windsor chair), noted British designers like Simon Pengelly, Bethan Gray and Simon Hasan exhibited alongside sympathetic Scandinavians, Italians and Chileans.

Americans turned up at Design Junction as well. Thirteen designers from the United States, including Mike & Maaike and Lindsey Adelman, pooled their experiments with streamlined forms and seductive materials in a show called “America Made Me.” And a transcontinental marriage was contracted between the London furniture maker Russell Pinch and the New York design shop the Future Perfect. The latter is now moving into manufacturing and will be the sole distributor of Mr. Pinch’s voluptuous new Goddard sofa.

NO milieu, however, was more transporting than the East End neighborhood of Shoreditch. It’s not just that the area harbors a disproportionate share of creative workers. Or that you can find a unique retail typology here: the combined design gallery and cafe (go for the lasagna, leave with the ceramics).

It’s that residents of this former manufacturing quarter turned their spaces and practices into time machines as they displayed their loyalty to British industry and craft.

“Shoreditch was the center of the furniture industry, which is why I’m here,” said Sheridan Coakley, founder of the 27-year-old furniture company SCP. Mr. Coakley’s shop on Curtain Road offered not only Matthew Hilton sofas and Donna Wilson poufs but also demonstrations of willow basket weaving by the young Dublin design company Makers & Brothers.

At Lee Broom’s studio on Rivington Street, which looked like a cross between a stable and a high-end saloon, sawdust covered the floor, and dozens of crystal light bulbs cut through the gloaming. Mr. Broom, an interior and product designer, worked with a lead crystal factory in Cumbria to produce the bulbs, which were inspired by traditional cut-glass liquor decanters and lighted by LEDs.

At the KK Outlet gallery at Hoxton Square, a one-man show of work by Dominic Wilcox included a pair of GPS shoes Mr. Wilcox made with a bespoke cobbler in the shoemaking region of Northamptonshire.

Wearers load computerized mapping information into the footwear with a USB cable. LEDs in the left shoe light up when the toe is pointed in the correct direction. LEDs in the right shoe turn green as the destination is approached. The shoes are activated when the heels click together — one reason Mr. Wilcox calls his invention No Place Like Home.

And at Labour and Wait, a vintage housewares store on Redchurch Street, the featured product was a 60-year-old aluminum measuring cup called the Tala Cook’s Measure, which is still made by hand in Liverpool. Vitrines installed in the tiny shop laid out its history with loving photos of the inventors and factory.

It’s not nostalgia, Mr. Coakley of SCP corrected when I floated that word. “It’s positive,” he said.

Still, an emerging generation of British designers, like their counterparts throughout the world, are finding poetry in a kind of traditionalism their parents abhorred. Sir Terence Conran might be an apostle of modernism, but evidence suggests that his son Jasper, a fashion designer who recently took charge of the family retail business, may become the Ralph Lauren of Britain.

I submit as evidence “Country,” a book just released in the United States, which is the younger Mr. Conran’s paean to rural England. The book is filled with photos of thatched roofs, rose-choked gardens and weather-beaten villagers, which all appear to have been snapped in one 15-minute window of late-afternoon September light. Everyone, no matter how broken with the effort of existing for decades without running water, is bathed in the same honeyed hue.

Also consider “Red,” a show at Conran of 50 design products that were reissued in limited editions in the same hot-pepper shade. Rather than peppers, however, Mr. Conran was thinking of the classic British mailbox.

Visually, the conceit worked well. Like the golden-light trick, Pantone 032 brought an ennobling uniformity to a Dyson heater and a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, so that you wanted to own anything touched by that magic paintbrush. It evoked the question of how color plays against form. It also made me wonder whether a change of shade really adds enough value to make it worth spending $1,764 for a Bertoia chair that normally sells for around $500.

At a dinner celebrating the opening of “Red,” Sir Terence thanked his son for bringing clarity back to Conran in his new capacity. “There was a freshness to the shop that has been lost in the last 25 years,” he said humbly, adding that Jasper’s perspective was not “bogged down with what is happening in Milan.”

Strikingly, however, Sir Terence also referred to red as the color of Marxism. It was the feistiest invocation I heard at the London Design Festival, where most participants, far from exhorting the workers of the world to unite, seemed to be asking gently that the workers of one’s homeland be loved. And employed.

The revolution will have to wait until next year.

By JULIE LASKY

Liu Ye / Sperone Westwater

Liu Ye's 'Birds' (2011) is part of a gallery show in New York.

Beijing's Liu Ye has made his mark with modest-sized, bright-hued paintings of childlike figures, his favorite cartoon character Miffy the bunny and works inspired by his art hero, Dutch-born abstract artist Piet Mondrian.

But now and then, Mr. Liu, one of China's most prominent contemporary painters, likes to make a bigger statement.

He's done that in "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway," at New York's Sperone Westwater gallery. The title's name comes from the show's centerpiece, a just-finished painting that's roughly 21 feet by 30 feet. His largest work to date, it includes bamboo imagery as well as nods to Mondrian, one of whose nonrepresentational classics is called "Broadway Boogie Woogie."

Trained as a muralist at Beijing's prestigious Chinese Academy of Fine Art, then in Berlin, Mr. Liu started working on "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway" last year in a friend's studio on Broadway and later moved it to the gallery, where visitors would see him working. The artist interprets the grass, a classic subject in Chinese art, to create a grid-like abstraction that also suggests a landscape, often considered the apex of Asian ink painting.

"What I do is about painting and art history. Chinese aesthetics have a traditional system, history, very high quality and taste, different from Western taste but quite meaningful in our time," says Mr. Liu, born in 1964.

His art remains highly coveted in Asia. In December 2010, "Baishi Knew Mondrian" sold at Beijing's Poly International Auction for $4.4 million, very likely to a local buyer. The work depicts a much-revered modern Chinese master artist who worked in ink and died in the 1950s. Last October at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, "Portrait of Qi Baishi" sold for US$1.8 million.

Art adviser Jehan Chu of Vermillion Art Collections in Hong Kong says Mr. Liu's most sought-after paintings "are from the mid-to-late 1990s and feature nautical-themed cherubs posing against sweeping battleship or theater-themed backdrops." In November at Christie's Hong Kong, "Blue Sea," with one of Mr. Liu's trademark sailor boys, went for $1.8 million.

Sperone Westwater would not disclose prices for its show, which will have seven works—including older, more typical small pieces that usually trade in the $500,000 range, and new paintings like the 8-by-10-inch "Birds." Classic Northern European painting inspired that work, Mr. Liu says. "I love Flemish paintings—small, but the idea is huge. I like making small paintings because I need to use my mind. But I also love large paintings because they are physical." The exhibition closes Oct. 27.

—Alexandra A. Seno

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., opened last November to good reviews—mostly. But some critics zoomed in on a big failing: the absence of top works by artists of the postwar period, when American art marched to the front of the international stage.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Mark Rothko's 'No. 210/No. 211 (Orange).'

Now Crystal Bridges, lavishly financed by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, has filled one major gap with the purchase of a 1960 painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, "No. 210/No. 211 (Orange)." An example of his most prized works, it has been shown publicly only twice and has been in a private Swiss collection since the mid-1960s. "Each orange has a different glow—it's very vibrant," says museum director Don Bacigalupi.

He declined to disclose the price tag, but Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, pegged it at about $25 million.

Rothko works have been selling well. One of Sotheby's anchors in its big New York fall auction series will be the 1954 "No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)," which it expects to sell for at least $35 million. Last May, his fiery "Orange, Red, Yellow," from 1961, fetched a record $86.9 million at Christie's, way past its high presale estimate of $45 million. Crystal Bridges looked seriously at that painting, though Mr. Bacigalupi declined to say whether the museum bid. When the opportunity to buy "No. 210/No. 211" came along, in a private deal brokered by Christie's, the museum jumped. (The unusual numbering is Rothko's own.)

The public will first see the painting on Oct. 13, at the opening of a special exhibition, "See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art." The show focuses on artists' use of light, starting with the mid-19th century landscape "luminists" and continuing through American Impressionists and modernists like Rothko and Dan Flavin to contemporary artists like James Turrell. When that show closes on Jan. 28, the Rothko will join the permanent-collection galleries.

Mr. Bacigalupi says that he'll use the Rothko purchase as an opportunity to rethink the display of the museum's postwar galleries. In fact, they and other galleries have already changed since the opening, as the museum has added works. They include an early glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly; paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, Theodore Roszak and Miriam Schapiro; and a collection of 466 American prints and drawings that includes images by Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Reginald Marsh, Charles Sheeler and James Abbot MacNeill Whistler, assembled over 30 years by a European.

—Judith H. Dobrzynski

By A.J. GOLDMANN

Berlin

This city's revered Old Masters, a trove of more than 3,000 paintings that includes masterworks by Caravaggio, Bruegel, Titian and Vermeer, has collided with a planned gift of 20th-century art that the city may be in danger of losing.

Ever since June 12, when the German Parliament voted to allocate €10 million ($12.8 million) to retrofit the building now housing the Gemäldegalerie—Berlin's Painting Gallery—for the city's collection of 20th-century art, the proposal has sparked heated debate among art historians, conservators and museum directors world-wide.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin)/Maximilian Meisse

The Gemäldegalerie—Berlin's Painting Gallery

In 2010, Heiner and Ulla Pietzsch promised to donate to Berlin their $190 million collection of about 150 Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist works on the condition that it be integrated into the city's collection of 20th-century art. It has been widely reported that the Pietzsch donation was also made on the condition that the collection be put fully on display, a stipulation that Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's State Museums, denies. Mr. Pietzsch's intention was to help "the state museums finally get a gallery for the 20th century," Mr. Parzinger explained in an interview.

Even before any Pietzsch additions, Berlin's 20th-century art collection had already outgrown Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery, built in 1968. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation thought it had a solution to that space crunch: relocating the Old Masters and the Gemäldegalerie to Museum Island, Berlin's famed consortium of museums and a Unesco World Heritage Site, thus freeing up for modern art their former quarters in the area known as the Kulturforum. "It's not ust for the Pietzsch collection. It's for our whole collection," Mr. Parzinger claimed.

But in the German press, the plan has been represented as a clash between the old and the new, pitting Rembrandt and Leonardo against Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys. According to an Aug. 29 interview with the German wire service DPA, Mr. Pietzsch is dismayed with the resulting controversy and has threatened to withdraw his gift if a viable plan is not proposed by early next year.

"Speaking for myself, this has never been a battle between the ancients and the moderns," said Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor of German art at Harvard who has started an online petition against the planned move. Mr. Hamburger and the more than 13,000 others who have signed the petition fear that many Old Masters currently on display would go into storage for a decade or more, since the existing venue proposed for their relocation, the Bode Museum, which now houses the city's Sculpture Gallery, is too small to accommodate both collections.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Hamburger said that he is not categorically opposed to reuniting the painting and sculpture collections on Museum Island. He also agreed that Berlin needs more room for 20th-century art than the New National Gallery can provide. It was there that the Pietzsches' collection was shown in 2009. The success of that exhibition convinced the couple to donate its works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Pollock, Mark Rothko and others to Berlin. While well-heeled collectors in the U.S. sometimes decide to build their own museums, such arrangements are less common in Europe, where there is traditionally stronger government support for museums.

When Berlin was divided, so were its art collections. It was only in 1998 that a new museum opened to house the complete Picture Gallery in the Kulturforum, which had been laid out during the Cold War as a Western analogue to Museum Island, 2½ miles away in what was then East Germany. Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation officials say that keeping the Pietzsches happy has nothing to do with the planned move, which they call a realization of a longstanding wish to bring the Gemäldegalerie back to Museum Island.

Mr. Hamburger counters: "This is an idea that was floated [after reunification], that did not succeed, and that has continued to remain an idée fixe among certain past and present members of the foundation. But to speak of a plan is, I think, almost farcical."

But Mr. Parzinger insists that the move was always part of the "intellectual master plan" of Museum Island. The foundation wants to build a museum across from the Bode, on land owned by the Ministry of Culture that contains 19th-century army barracks, to house the collection of Northern European Art. Mr. Parzinger called it a "natural expansion" for the Bode Museum, put the cost of the new structure at €150 million, and said they might start building in 2017 or 2018.

"This new building will solve the problems of the three collections. It will allow the Old Masters and the sculptures to be shown together. It will allow at the Kulturforum a building to become available for the presentation of the modern collection," said Julien Chapuis, director of the Sculpture Gallery in an interview at the Bode.

Formerly the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the Bode was built in 1904 to house the city's painting and sculpture collections and reopened in 2006 after a seven-year renovation. It now bears the name of its first director, Wilhelm von Bode, who was immensely influential in his display philosophy, which included mixed-media installations and period rooms.

Last year, the Bode assembled a blockbuster show, "The Renaissance Portrait," which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For Mr. Chapuis, the success of that exhibition, which displayed paintings and sculptures in tandem, is a compelling argument for integrating the two collections. But Mr. Hamburger said that the show, which included loans from the Uffizi and the Louvre, said more about "the logic of blockbuster exhibitions."

Uniting the collections on the island may also have to do with the low attendance rates at both institutions, which receive 250,000 visitors each annually. But Mr. Parzinger believes that the Old Masters deserve a home on Museum Island, where they will complete the survey of art from antiquity to the 19th-century and create a Berlin "Louvre" out of collections that were, for historical reasons, unable to be displayed together.

Berlin now has more than a billion euros of backlogged cultural construction projects. On Museum Island alone, those continuing or slated for the next several years include the controversial rebuilding of the Hohenzollern Palace, a new visitor center and extensive renovations at the Pergamon Museum.

These projects are part of the reconstruction of the city since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mr. Chapuis said that the achievements of the past 23 years make him optimistic. "Nowhere else in Europe has there been more public money invested in cultural projects," he said. Mr. Parzinger said that the Gemädlegalerie would not close until there is concrete plan, and added that the foundation hopes to put as few artworks into storage as possible, partially in response to the controversy: "If we have this interim, it has to be for a very short span of years. My colleagues at the Bode say that they can show about 50% of both collections together. If we can find another [temporary] space and, in the end, can show up to 70% or 80% for a few years, then I think we can do this."

But for Mr. Hamburger, good intentions aren't enough. He said that moving "one of world's very greatest collections" required a realistic proposal that is, as of yet, lacking. "Given the German reputation for planning and efficiency, it's just unbelievable," he said.

He insisted that a collection that was "largely hidden from view for half a century" should not be allowed to go into storage after 14 years. "This is a collection that has seen more than its share of bad luck and been a political pawn for far too long. It should be treated with greater respect."

Mr. Goldmann writes about European arts and culture. He lives in Berlin.

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Venice

People are more familiar with the Venice art and film festivals and all the swellegance that goes along with celebrity artists and actors going to and fro by water taxi, but every other year there is an architecture biennale as well.

All the major players show up here too, but the mood is perhaps more earnest than glamorous. This year it was particularly so at the opening in late August as the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale laid bare a profession wrestling with its demons and a deeper dread that the public considers it irrelevant. "All good architects think they are making a contribution to society," said David Chipperfield, the 2012 director and the architect of such quietly resonant works as the 2009 rebuilding of the Neues Museum in Berlin. "Why does society think that architects are just a bunch of profiteering egotistical joyriders?"

Marco Zanta

This year's biennale explored the theme of 'common ground.' The Russian pavilion; and

This year's theme, Common Ground, was chosen by Mr. Chipperfield to be widely inclusive, and it was interpreted in almost as many ways as there were architects, curators, photographers and design editors involved—some 119 overall, presiding over 69 installations.

At the main exhibition in the vast Arsenale with its towering brick columns—where the Venetian fleet was built at the rate of one ship a day in the 16th century—and at the more than 30 national pavilions that complement the exhibition in the sprawling and dusty public gardens, three disparate notes reverberate insistently: design from the bottom up; the mysterious sources of architectural inspiration; and the art of building.

Design from the bottom up is a movement gaining momentum. Sometimes called "tactical urbanism," it is about communities taking matters into their own hands and building what they want and need—a response to frustration with architecture seen merely as expensive decoration, not effective problem-solving.

The best example in Venice is the replica of a squatter's bar plonked in the middle of the Arsenale. By the Venezuelan architects Urban-Think Tank, the installation re-creates a corner of an uncompleted office building in Caracas abandoned by developers during the financial crisis. The building is now occupied by some 750 families who have improvised markets, shops, apartments and restaurants—breaking through concrete and throwing up walls of the cheapest materials on hand. The replica café, complete with slap-dash brickwork, ice-cold cervezas and blasting television set, has become both a go-to meeting place and the site of impassioned debate about what architecture is and isn't.

Marco Zanta

The Caracas bar, known as 'View of Torre David,' by Urban-Think Tank.

With a slicker installation, the USA pavilion sends the same message of community empowerment. More than 100 color-coded roller shades have been feathered across the ceilings, each describing an instance of citizens in action. Among the stories: how a roving hipster flea market revitalized an empty warehouse and how volunteers "de-paved" an abandoned parking lot and planted trees.

And elsewhere at the biennale, a video tells the story of Tempelhof airport in Berlin, closed down in 2008. With the local government still fussing over development plans, the airport has been taken over by Berliners who have planted vegetable gardens, turned runways into skateboard tracks and generally transformed the formerly vital Cold War hub into a people's parade ground.

The sections of Common Ground dealing with architectural inspiration are more cerebral—but also more intriguing for those who believe in design as something more premeditated than spontaneous.

British architect Zaha Hadid pays tribute to Frei Otto, a German engineer famous for innovative tensile structures, with her own elasticizing lily-shaped form emanating from a complex marriage of old mathematical and new digital formulas. And another London firm, FAT, has installed a cabin-size rubber cast of one of the most copied buildings on earth, Palladio's Villa Rotunda. On a more personal scale, New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien—fresh from successfully relocating and expanding the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia—have invited 34 architects and friends to fill small trunks and mail them to Venice. From the rocks painted with graffiti messages that Japanese architect Toyo Ito recovered from a tsunami-ravaged village to U.S. architect Steven Holl's frayed copy of Paul Celan's "Last Poems," the opened trunks offer some revealing glimpses into the designing mind.

Marco Zanta

Zaha Hadid's 'Arum.'

The biennale's least controversial and most easy to admire installations, by far, are about the art of building. Anupama Kundoo, a young architect from India, has painstakingly rebuilt to scale her own house in South India with the help of Venetian, Australian and Indian craftspeople and students—down to cleverly made vaults formed from stacked plastic cups and coffers from inverted clay bowls. Almost 15 feet long, Darryl Chen's exquisite ink hand drawing in the style of an ancient Chinese scroll—at the British pavilion—depicts a village outside Beijing being developed by local artisans and peasants, another bottom-up project, dubbed by the artist as "an atypical new socialist village."

The upbeat celebration of influence and craftsmanship could not, however, drown out the persistent anxiety that the profession is feeling. The dire economics of being an architect today are demonstrated graphically by a group of unemployed architects from Spain—where half of all architectural practices in Madrid and Barcelona have folded—hired for the duration of the biennale to hold up models of buildings commissioned and built in the premeltdown boom years.

Those years witnessed a glorious flowering of architectural monuments, from Frank Gehry's radiant Disney Hall in Los Angeles to Norman Foster's reconstitution of the Reichstag in Berlin. And yet, if this year's biennale is the measure of anything it is that the time for showboat buildings is well past and that architects themselves are the most eager to move on and build for the everyday world where people really live. It's about time.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

By CHAD BRAY

The artist behind the "Hope" poster that became a symbol of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was sentenced on Friday to two years of probation and 300 hours of community service for lying during a copyright dispute involving the iconic image.

Reuters

Shepard Fairey on Friday in New York

Shepard Fairey, who also was ordered by the judge to pay a $25,000 fine to the government, in February admitted to fabricating documents and lying in a civil lawsuit he had brought against the Associated Press in 2009, after the news agency accused him of violating its copyrights. The news agency said Mr. Fairey had used a close-up AP photograph taken of Mr. Obama at a 2006 event as the basis for his poster—a red, white and blue image of Mr. Obama with the word "Hope" underneath.

Mr. Fairey had claimed that he used a different photo as the basis, but when he realized that wasn't true, prosecutors said, he created false documents and deleted electronically stored documents to hide the fact that he had indeed used the 2006 image as a reference.

"I am deeply ashamed and remorseful that I didn't live up to my own standards of honesty and integrity," Mr. Fairey said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

The 42-year-old Mr. Fairey had faced as much as six months in prison after pleading guilty in February to a single misdemeanor count of criminal contempt. Prosecutors, who sought jail time in the case, said anything less would send "a terrible message" to people who might commit similar conduct in the future.

But Daniel Gitner, Mr. Fairey's lawyer, said his client shouldn't serve any jail time because he had admitted his misconduct as soon as it was discovered and well before the government's investigation began. He also undertook efforts to settle the case and make the AP whole, despite having a valid argument on which he may have prevailed at trial in his lawsuit, Mr. Gitner said.

In a statement after the hearing, Mr. Fairey said: "My wrong-headed actions, born out of a moment of fear and embarrassment, have not only been financially and psychologically costly to myself and my family, but also helped to obscure what I was fighting for in the first place—the ability of artists everywhere to be inspired and freely create art without reprisal."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas said the artist could seek to end his probation after a year's time if he completes the community service by then.

As part of last year's settlement of the civil lawsuit, AP was paid $1.6 million, a portion of which came from insurance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Levy said.

"We hope this case will serve as a clear reminder to all of the importance of fair compensation for those who gather and produce original news content," Gary Pruitt, AP's president and chief executive, said Friday.

Write to Chad Bray at chad.bray@wsj.com