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

Art Under Assault

'Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962'|
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Oct. 6-Jan. 14

The premise of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is deceptively simple: The show surveys nearly 100 canvases that have been assaulted, creatively, by their makers—either by scarring, ripping, cutting or burning—during the unsettling years after World War II.

The museum says that by upending the traditional idea of the canvas as a window-pane-like portal into a faraway world, these artists collectively transformed painting into sculpture—a mixed-media move that artists have been grappling with ever since.

Expect plenty of unusual materials to pop up in these pieces, including the canvas, welded steel and wire constructions that animate Lee Bontecou's abstracts, such as the above untitled work from 1962.

There are also smashed glass bottles embedded in Shozo Shimamoto's lime-colored "Cannon Picture" from 1956 and bits of fur stuck within Kazuo Shiraga's red 1963 abstract, "Wildboar Hunting."

—Kelly Crow

courtesy of the artist

'Map of China'

Mr. Ai Goes to Washington

'Ai Weiwei: According to What?'
Oct. 7-Feb. 24,
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington

Artist Ai Weiwei has become exponentially visible in recent years for his social activism, amplified by his well-documented travails with the Chinese government. But opportunities to actually see the art by which Mr. Ai first made his name have been limited.

"According to What?," the first major survey in the United States of Mr. Ai's work, opens Oct. 7 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The show later travels to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Pérez Art Museum Miami and Brooklyn Museum.

"According to What?" originated in 2009 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, curated by chief curator Mami Kataoka. It includes early work of Mr. Ai's, such as his "New York Photographs" (1983-93, shown at the Asia Society in New York last year); and signature pieces where he reinvents Chinese relics as art objects by destroying them ("Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," 1995/2009, "Coca-Cola Vase," 2007). There's also new work made since the Mori exhibition.

His prolific blog and Twitter activism have raised the ire of the Chinese government. But Mr. Ai's art work also frequently engages with contemporary Chinese social and political issues, (see 'Map of China,' right), commenting on government corruption or mismanagement through metaphor, such as the installation piece "Snake Ceiling," composed of varyingly sized backpacks to represent school children crushed by poor school construction during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

"By doing this retrospective we hope to draw attention back to the art work itself," said Kerry Brougher, Hirshhorn deputy director and chief curator, who organized the Washington show with assistant curator Mika Yoshitake. "It's a real mixture of traditional concepts in Chinese art mixed with contemporary issues that only Ai Weiwei can do."

The Mori and the Hirshhorn began talks about bringing "According to What?" to North America in 2009. By the time Mr. Ai was arrested and detained for 81 days last year by Chinese authorities, the Hirshhorn had already mapped out a floor plan for the exhibition, Mr. Brougher said.

Mr. Ai was prohibited from traveling outside Beijing for a year after his detention. While the probation was lifted earlier this summer, Mr. Ai has said that he is still unable to travel due to further investigations. The Hirshhorn said the artist and his assistants have been asked to come to Washington for the installation of "According to What?"

—Kimberly Chou

Foundation to Auction Over 20,000 Works, Hopes to Reap More Than $100 Million

By KELLY CROW

Andy Warhol's estate is cashing out.

A quarter-century after the Pop artist died, his art foundation is about to upend the Warhol market by auctioning off the rest of his estate—including more than 20,000 works it expects to sell for a total of more than $100 million.

A quarter century after Pop artist Andy Warhol died, his art foundation is planning to auction off his estate at Christie's this fall, including hundreds of Warhol works valued at over $100 million. Kelly Crow reports on the News Hub. Photo: Reuters.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts said Wednesday that it has enlisted Christie's to help sell off its remaining inventory of silk-screen paintings, drawings, prints, collages, photographs and archival materials because it no longer wants to broker occasional sales of these objects on its own.

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

Highlights of the trove include Warhol's 'Self-Portrait in Fright Wig,' a 1970s Polaroid print, which Christie's expects to fetch at least $15,000.

Chairman Michael Straus said the foundation aims to use the proceeds to increase its $225 million endowment and expand the scope of its art-related grant programs. "We're converting art into money," Mr. Straus said.

Warhol is one of the art market's top commodities, and this selloff could significantly recalibrate his prices because the foundation is putting so many pieces into broader circulation for the first time. These include at least 350 paintings and 1,000 prints, plus thousands of drawings and unique photographs the artist took during his four-decade career.

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer whose family owns at least 800 Warhols, said the estate has hinted for over a year that it might want to close up shop, and Mr. Mugrabi said he and a few other dealers offered to buy it, but the foundation declined. Now, he said, he worries the foundation will "dilute" the Warhol brand by flooding the market with too material at once. "It's ridiculous—they have a great product, and they're pushing it out into the market like cattle," he added.

Warhol's prolific output has long been sifted and traded on varying levels, with collectors paying a premium for the 8,000 paintings and sculptures he produced between 1952 and his death in 1987. These still turn up at auction so consistently—about 200 works a year—that they have become a bellwether for the entire $25 billion art market. Last year alone, auctions sold $346 million worth of his art, according to Artnet, a database that tracks auction sales.

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

"Three Targets," a 19-foot silk-screen showing a trio of bullet-riddled bull's eyes, is estimated to sell for at least $1 million.

Five years ago, a collector paid Christie's a record $71.7 million for a 1963 work, "Green Car Crash."

But farther down the artistic food chain, there are plenty of collectors who continue to chase the more than 100,000 photographs, prints, film negatives and drawings on sketchpads that Warhol created alongside his best-known silk-screens of Hollywood starlets. Prices for these lesser-known works can fluctuate wildly from a few thousand dollars for a photograph to more than $5 million apiece for a drawing.

Mr. Straus said the estate isn't sitting on a slew of soup-can masterworks, but what's left does cover the entire arc of the artist's career, from his early years as a commercial illustrator to his Pop art to his final days as a New York social fixture, with a Polaroid camera regularly hanging around his neck. The foundation has timed its sale on the heels of a major retrospective of the artist's work, which opens Sept. 18 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since none of the estate's remaining material has ever been sold—or even seen by the public—before, Christie's is preparing to market it as a treasure trove. The auction house, a unit of London-based Christie's International PLC , said it would kick off the sale by offering roughly 350 Warhol works on Nov. 12 in its New York auction room, followed by a series of online-only sales of lower-priced pieces next February and for years beyond.

Highlights include "Three Targets," a 19-foot-long silk-screen showing a trio of bullet-riddled bull's eyes, estimated to sell for at least $1 million. "Jackie," a red 1960s screen print and paper collage portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, has an estimated sales price of at least $200,000. Among the thousands of Polaroid photographs is a late-1970s "Self Portrait," in which the artist wears black sunglasses and his signature silver wig. Christie's expects it to fetch at least $15,000.

New York dealer Paul Kasmin said Christie's plan to roll out the majority of its offerings online indicates a dearth of potentially record-setting masterpieces. "It's a clever way to get good values for less-important pieces," he said, particularly since Warhol is such a well-known art brand. "It would be pretty fatal for anyone else."

Christie's specialist Amy Cappellazzo said the auction house intends to space out its online sales over several years in order to avoid offering up too much material all at once. It also will broker some sales privately. "We know Warhol's market well, and we how to turn the tap on and off," she added.

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

'Jackie,' a screen print and paper collage of Jacqueline Kennedy, has an estimated price of at least $200,000.

However the works fare at auction, the huge divestiture amounts to a major reorganization of one of the art world's most powerful entities. For years, dealers and scholars have gained entry into the foundation's warehouse in New York's Chelsea neighborhood in hopes of unearthing an overlooked Warhol masterwork to buy or borrow. Plenty more have sought help from its auxiliary authentication board about other potential Warhols, a service it quit offering last fall after several of its rulings spurred costly law suits.

The foundation said it was simply time for a change. Years ago, it gave away 4,000 of its top pieces to create the permanent collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where the artist grew up. It has also already donated $250 million from past art sales to cultural causes. But by selling off its remaining art assets, it can pare down its operating costs by eliminating the need to store or insure the art, and focus more on its philanthropy. "We sold works in the beginning to build up our endowment," he added, "but now we want to maximize our grant-making."

Market watchers will likely keep a close eye on the sales, in part because they could alter the value of Warhol's works on paper, which haven't seen price spikes to match his silk-screens over the years. The top price for a Warhol work on paper is the $4.2 million that Sotheby'sBID +1.90% got three years ago for his pencil drawing of a wad of money, "Untitled (Roll of Dollar Bills)." Auction sales of his prints fell by a third last year, to $25 million, according to Artnet.

Next spring's sales of Warhol works will also mark the first time Christie's offers fine art using an online-only sale format—a potential game-changer for an industry that drums up much of its buzz from theatrical saleroom auctions. Christie's CEO Steven Murphy said the company began experimenting with online-only sales last year by offering some of Elizabeth Taylor's estate pieces, followed by a series of online-only wine sales. The results—along with bidders' willingness to click and bid on pieces during live sales—encouraged him to expand with name-brand art.

"I think it's going to blow open the doors to a wider, global audience than we could reach in a traditional sale," he said. If successful, Mr. Murphy said Christie's may offer additional artists' works in online-only sales in the future.

Rival Sotheby's experimented with online-only sales over a decade ago but ended its deal with eBay Inc. in 2003 after bidders shied away.

Mr. Kasmin, the dealer, said he has been curious about the full contents of the Warhol estate for years; now, he is resigned to sorting through it online. "I would have liked to have gotten in there before everyone else," he said.

When it comes to reviving online-only sales, Warhol may have a leg up on other artists in part because his name and style are already familiar with collectors around the globe. The fact that these works come directly from his estate also helps confirm their authenticity in a realm where fakes abound, particularly in the prints marketplace.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 6, 2012, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Warhol Art Trove Pops Up for Sale.

By STEVE KNOPPER

After a lengthy architectural discussion about image-making, color quadrants, function following form and dynamic thinking, Earl Santee gets a nostalgic catch in his voice. "I remember sitting in old Tiger Stadium, right next to the dugout, just marveling about how intimate it was, and how loud it was," said the 56-year-old architect, "and I could smell Italian sausages and green peppers and onions cooking in the concourses.

"There's just a spirit in the place, even if no one's there," continued the senior principal for the firm Populous, based in Kansas City, Mo., where Mr. Santee grew up. "It's hard to forget that."

Ryan Nicholson for The Wall Street Journal

Earl Santee, with a model of Marlins Park, at the Populous office in Kansas City, Mo.

A lifelong Royals fan who took courses as a kid at the Kansas City Art Institute, Mr. Santee has designed 18 Major League Baseball stadiums. In 1992, he and his team came up with Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which started a trend of friendly, open-air throwbacks. In 2009, Populous was responsible for the new Yankee Stadium, whose limestone-and-granite facade recalls the original House That Ruth Built. In early March, the Miami Marlins opened Marlins Park, a Populous design that is like no other ballpark. It's supremely modern, a flat, white part-sphere with sapphire-blue glass that brings to mind the teeth of a space alien. More than that: With its perfect sightlines to the Bermuda-grass outfield and with hot dogs and Cuban sandwiches for sale throughout the park, it retains that peppers-and-onions ambience.

"They nailed it," said Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins owner who made his millions over the decades as an art dealer. "They had been used to doing buildings and baseball stadiums in a traditional way. This was not a traditional way of approaching a ballpark."

Populous signed on in 2003, the year the Marlins won the World Series. Mr. Santee and his staff began by renting apartments in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, eating at local restaurants and, for nine years, generally becoming part of the community. By 2006, they were leaning toward the site of the former Orange Bowl, in part because East Little Havana, an impoverished neighborhood full of great old theater buildings and beloved eateries, was ripe for an upgrade. Miami, Miami-Dade County and the Marlins ultimately picked the same site, and Populous went to work.

At that point, the architects turned their attention to the ballpark itself. "They all have different ways of how they express themselves," Mr. Santee said. "Some people can't hand-draw very well, but they can do 3-D modeling. Some people doodle. Some people sketch. That's part of the process."

Greg Sherlock, a senior architect, was keeper of the sketchbook. By project's end, it contained 140 pages by several different people, some doodled with felt-tip pen, others painted with watercolors. Eventually Mr. Sherlock drew an abstract sketch that he describes as "nothing more than a swirl of lines" that approximated what a curvy, stadium-size mass might look like, with the Miami skyline in the background and the ocean in the distance.

When Messrs. Santee and Loria happened to be in London at the same time, they met at a Claridge's hotel restaurant. Mr. Santee showed Mr. Loria a book that contained Mr. Sherlock's drawing and others. Mr. Loria, who studied art history in college, liked "bits and pieces" and made a sketch of his own on a napkin. Mr. Santee drew a few things, too.

Mr. Santee shared the napkins with his Marlins project staff of about 35 people. They tinkered in their design labs, working to reconcile the broad art ideas (Mr. Loria was obsessed with Spanish sculptor Joan Miró's colorful surrealism) with ironclad specifications (a retractable roof that would withstand hurricane winds of 137 miles per hour).

Finally, Mr. Sherlock walked down the street from his office to a Hobby Lobby to buy modeling clay. "I started to sort of sculpt," he said. "And it quickly came to fruition in a lot of ways." Mr. Loria's napkin was what Mr. Santee calls "a moment." Mr. Sherlock's clay model was another—it broadly shaped the final design. "Our philosophy is, whatever it takes to get it out of your mind and on the table, do so," Mr. Sherlock said.

While the Populous architects were working on fitting the elements together, Mr. Loria and the Marlins were coming up with ideas of their own. They invited artists to apply for a Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places commission to design a sculpture to loudly celebrate every Marlins home run. Pop artist Red Grooms won with a whizzing, brightly colored sculpture made of water, spinning fish and flamingos. David Samson, the team's president, suggested the two large aquariums that wound up on either side of home plate. "I had reservations: 'How is that going to work?' " Mr. Santee said. "But they have a kind of luminescence to them. They're kind of a calling card."

Mr. Loria crammed the park with art, by Miró and Roy Lichtenstein, and the overall effect of the 37,442-seat structure is both soothingly contemporary and ridiculously over the top.

Economically, the ballpark is a work in progress. Attendance was up 52% by early August, from 18,700 per game in 2011 to 28,400. But none of the nine other teams that built a new stadium during the last 10 years has had lower average attendance in the first year of a new park, according to baseball-reference.com data. And some Miami critics are already fretting that the $515 million park, mostly funded with public money, is turning into a disaster given the Marlins' disappointing play this season.

Mr. Santee's standard for success is different. After a decade of turning himself into a Miamian, he wants locals to see themselves in the stadium. "When you've done so many buildings, that's really the fun part of the job—trying to create different ways to come up with an original idea, where people say, 'That's me,' " he said. "It's for them. It's not something they've seen anywhere else."

Making Marlins Park

 

Populous

BE LOCAL: The architects made a point of integrating the look and feel of Miami's skyline into the park, above.

Populous

THINK IN PEN: Earl Santee and Greg Sherlock drew these frameworks of the tree columns that support the roof. 'I have a little book,' Mr. Santee said of his sketching habit. 'I'm just thinking and doodling. It's all pen. I don't usually erase.'

Archipicture At Das Parkhotel in Ottensheim, Austria, guests sleep on beds inside industrial-size pipes. Concrete or its byproducts make up almost a fifth of the waste in the world's landfills.

Concrete often gets a bum rap as the material of choice for drab factories and brutal, anonymous housing complexes. But it's actually quite versatile, used in everything from the monumental Pantheon of ancient Rome to Frank Lloyd Wright's elegant Fallingwater house. In any event, there is no escaping it. About 265 billion cubic feet of concrete are produced annually—that comes out to about 35 cubic feet for every person on the planet.

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Ichiro Sugioka

"Concrete," edited by William Hall ($49.95, Phaidon Press), explores the many forms that this mixture of crushed rock, cement, sand and water can take. Yes, concrete can be cold and imposing—but as the 175 structures in the book attest, it can also be colorful, playful and delicate.

A version of this article appeared September 1, 2012, on page C12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: ConcreteIdeas.