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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (78%); MOUNTAINS (76%); IMMIGRATION (72%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (70%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (60%) GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%) NEW YORK, USA (97%) UNITED STATES (97%); EUROPE (90%); NETHERLANDS (90%) TITLE: Netherland (Book)>; Netherland (Book)> LOAD-DATE: May 16, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Joseph O'Neill (PHOTOGRAPH BY LISA ACKERMAN/PANTHEON BOOKS)(pg. E33) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 770 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Antiques BYLINE: By Wendy Moonan SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; ANTIQUES; Pg. 32 LENGTH: 1022 words TENDING TO THE LEGACY Of a Deco Master It's time to add another name to the galaxy of 20th-century French design superstars: Leleu. Hudson Hills Press has just published ''The House of Leleu: Classic French Style for a Modern World, 1920-1973,'' about the provincial French designer who hit it big at the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris and never looked back. The 480-page book was organized by Francoise Siriex, a decorator at the Leleu firm for 23 years and its dedicated archivist. It includes historical photos, drawings and essays by curators from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and the Museum of the 1930s in Boulogne-Billancourt (which had a Leleu exhibition last year). Jules Leleu (1883-1961) never achieved the international fame of Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Jean Michel Frank or Le Corbusier, but he was just as successful and probably more prolific than his better-known contemporaries. (As early as 1925, the year Leleu won a grand prize at the exposition of decorative arts, he sold a commode in burl amboyna wood with ivory inlays to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) The House of Leleu was a family business. By the late 1930s, Leleu's sons, Andre and Jean, and his daughter, Paule, were active partners. After their father's death, they and other relatives and a loyal staff kept the firm going. An exhibition of 40 postwar designs by the House of Leleu opened this week at Maison Gerard, an East Village gallery at 53 East 10th Street (through June 20). The furniture, rugs, screens and light fixtures -- many special commissions -- are all from one apartment in Paris that Andre Leleu designed in 1964. Because of protracted litigation over the estate of its owner, the apartment was sealed for 14 years. Last fall Benoist F. Drut and Gerard Widdershoven, the owners of Maison Gerard, were shown the apartment. ''It was like a time capsule,'' Mr. Drut said in an interview. ''Everything was covered with a thick coating of dust, but nothing had suffered any damage. The pieces hadn't seen the light of day for a decade.'' The partners were amazed. ''When I started this business in the 1970s, you would sometimes see apartments from the 1930s that were complete, but today fewer and fewer of these original interiors exist,'' Mr. Widdershoven said. ''Often, the furniture was divided among the kids and sold.'' They bought everything, including a tortoiseshell-veneered cabinet with jade accents, a green lacquered bookcase, a mahogany chest inlaid with mother of pearl, and an amoeba-shaped red lacquered table with patinated and gilt-bronze legs. All were in mint condition. The furniture of Leleu is often compared to that of Ruhlmann. Each liked simplified shapes, the use of exotic woods, marquetry and inlay of ivory. Leleu outlived Ruhlmann, and his style evolved. He grew adventurous, adopting new materials like artificial lacquer, fiberglass, plastic and aluminum. Several tables at Maison Gerard have modern steel legs. Leleu was never antimodern. (He was one of the pioneer aviators in France.) Along with the interiors of industrialists' houses, he designed sleek salons for ocean liners like the Ile-de-France and the Normandie, corporate offices and interiors for public institutions (the League of Nations in Geneva, the Sorbonne, French embassies, even the French president's private railroad car). In ''The House of Leleu,'' Beatrice Salmon, the director of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, writes, ''Marked by two major conflicts, the 20th century was the stage on which the struggle between modernity and tradition took place.'' Leleu might not have had the spare architectural style of Corbu, but that struggle is nowhere apparent in his work or that of his children. COLONIAL PORCELAIN Until June 1 the Philadelphia Museum of Art is showing ''Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris,'' a landmark exhibition that has attracted ceramics collectors across America. In Gallery 286 are displayed 19 pieces of tableware (pickle dishes, sauceboats and small baskets) made in blue and white soft-paste porcelain. They are the only known surviving relics of the American China Manufactory, a company that produced porcelain in Philadelphia from 1770 to 1772. After discovering fine white clay in Delaware, the founders Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris built a factory to produce domestic wares for colonists, hoping to supplant English imports. How they assembled a team of skilled throwers, turners, modelers and painters is not known; the workers were probably from England. Sadly, the factory was not a success. (The British soon undercut the company by lowering the prices of imports.) In form, Bonnin and Morris wares look very much like products of the contemporary Bow factory in England. Most are white with underglaze decoration, blue painted bouquets or chinoiserie vignettes. In style, most are rococo, with curving lines and disjunctions of scale in the motifs. The best example is a pickle stand inspired by English prototypes that has three mollusk shells on its base and a ribbed bowl balancing on top. The shells have been molded on real scallop shells. They are attached to an upright shaft, which is stippled to look like fossilized coral encrusted with tubeworms. Clusters of tiny cockleshells and snails cascade over the base. Cone-shaped feet under the scallop shells give this intensely artificial confection the stability to do its job: carry a few pickled fruits. The 2007 edition of ''Ceramics in America,'' a journal published by the Chipstone Foundation, is devoted to Bonnin and Morris. In one essay the editor, Robert Hunter, and a skilled potter, Michelle Erickson, illustrate the process of producing pickle stands. ''More than 70 molded elements went into their construction,'' they write. ''Preparation of the individual components of the pickle stand appears to have been a straightforward but time-consuming task.'' In other words, it took hours. No wonder the factory didn't last too long. Its products were too labor-intensive and too expensive.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 771 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Solar Valley Rises in an Overcast Land BYLINE: By MARK LANDLER SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1515 words DATELINE: THALHEIM, Germany This sad stretch of eastern Germany, with its deserted coal mines and corroded factories, epitomizes post-industrial gloom. It is a place where even the clouds rarely seem to part. Yet the sun was shining here the other day -- and nowhere more brightly than at Q-Cells, a German company that surpassed Sharp last year to become the world's largest maker of photovoltaic solar cells. Q-Cells is the main tenant among a flowering cluster of solar start-ups here in an area known as Solar Valley. Thanks to its aggressive push into renewable energies, cloud-wreathed Germany has become an unlikely leader in the race to harness the sun's energy. It has by far the largest market for photovoltaic systems, which convert sunlight into electricity, with roughly half of the world's total installations. And it is the third-largest producer of solar cells and modules, after China and Japan. Now, though, with so many solar panels on so many rooftops, critics say Germany has too much of a good thing -- even in a time of record oil prices. Conservative lawmakers, in particular, want to pare back generous government incentives that support solar development. They say solar generation is growing so fast that it threatens to overburden consumers with high electricity bills. Solar-energy entrepreneurs warn that reducing incentives will deprive Germany of its pole position in an industry of the future. As proof, they point to the United States and Japan, which were once solar stars but have faded as their government subsidies became less enticing. The debate over solar subsidies is a test of how an environmentally minded country can move from nurturing a promising alternative energy sector to creating a mass-market industry that can compete with conventional energy sources on its own footing. It is a tricky transition, even with a sympathetic population. ''Germany's law has basically been a turbocharger,'' said Anton Milner, the chief executive of Q-Cells. If the proposals being floated by the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, were adopted, he predicted, ''you'd kill the industry.'' Germany's surging market has lured investors from Canada, Norway and the United States. More than 40,000 people work in the photovoltaic industry, helping to revive blighted regions like this one. On Wednesday, Q-Cells reported a 63 percent jump in its first-quarter operating profit, showing the riches to be reaped from sunshine. Leading a visitor past gleaming rows of solar panels on the roof of Q-Cells' headquarters, Mr. Milner, a British-born former executive at Royal Dutch Shell, said Germany could not afford to blow this chance. Surely, he says, the naysayers are aware that the cost of electricity will spike along with the price of fossil fuels? Joachim Pfeiffer, a member of Parliament who is drafting the plan to cut incentives, said: ''We don't want to slaughter the solar industry; we think photovoltaic technology will have a great future. But to have that future, we can't have overkill now.'' At the heart of the debate is the Renewable Energy Sources Act. It requires power companies to buy all the alternative energy produced by these systems, at a fixed above-market price, for 20 years. This mechanism, known as a feed-in tariff, gives entrepreneurs a powerful incentive to install solar panels. With a locked-in customer base for their electricity, they can earn a reliable return on their investment. It has worked: homeowners rushed to clamp solar panels on their roofs and farmers planted them in fields where sheep once grazed. The amount of electricity generated by these installations rose 60 percent in 2007 compared with 2006, faster than any other renewable energy (solar still generates just 0.6 percent of Germany's total electricity, compared with 6.4 percent for wind). This, in a country that gets an average of only 1,528 hours of sunshine a year, less than a third of the total daylight hours. That figure is comparable to London's but it is one-third fewer sunshine hours than in Florence, Italy, and only half San Diego's, making German solar installations less efficient, and their growth all the more remarkable. With wind, biomass and other alternative energy also growing, Germany derives 14.2 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. That puts it ahead of a European Union target for countries to generate 12.5 percent of electricity from alternative sources by 2010. Spain, France, Italy and Greece have copied Germany's solar incentives. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed a plan in which utilities pay rebates to customers with solar panels, though only up to the amount of electricity they would have otherwise used from conventional energy sources. ''Germany is a driving force worldwide,'' said Hermann Scheer, a member of Parliament who helped write the law. ''It is very important that the driving force not become a lame duck.'' Christian Democrats, however, say the law has been too successful for its own good. Utilities, they note, are allowed to pass along the extra cost of buying renewable energy to customers, and there is no cap on the capacity that can be installed -- as exists in other countries to prevent subsidies from mushrooming. At the moment, solar energy adds 1.01 euros ($1.69) a month to a typical home electricity bill, a modest surcharge that Germans are willing to pay. That will increase to 2.14 euros a month by 2014, according to the German Solar Energy Association. But the volume of solar-generated energy is rising much faster than originally predicted, and critics contend that the costs will soar. Mr. Pfeiffer, the legislator, said solar power could end up adding 8 euros ($12.32) to a monthly electricity bill, which would alienate even the most green-minded. With no change in the law, he says, the solar industry will soak up 120 billion euros ($184 billion) in public support by 2015. The conservatives would like to accelerate the rate at which the feed-in tariff declines, now set at 5 percent a year. Under a draft proposal, the tariff would fall 30 percent in 2009, and 9 percent a year after that. The law's term might also be shortened to 15 years from 20. Mrs. Merkel, who boasts of her green credentials, has yet to enter the debate. Her party must win over its coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, which might be tough, given that the law was strengthened in 2004 by the last government, led by the Social Democrats. Meanwhile, solar advocates are testifying before Parliament and publishing articles defending the law. Eicke R. Weber, a prominent physicist, said the estimate of 120 billion euros in subsidies was too high because it did not take into account the rising price of conventional electricity. That, plus a gradual decline in the cost of solar, will close the price gap between conventional and solar-generated electricity by 2014 or 2015, he predicted. The actual subsidy, Mr. Weber said, will be 40 billion to 60 billion euros, a third of what the German state is paying to prop up its superannuated coal industry. ''If we're willing to burden the population with 180 billion euros of support for a dying industry, who do we worry about taking one-third of this to make Germany the world leader in photovoltaic technology?'' said Mr. Weber, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg. Defenders of solar energy see the hand of Germany's power companies behind the effort to change the law. Reducing incentives for solar would favor wind, which is a more natural fit for the utilities, since the cost of building wind farms is too high for the average homeowner with an empty roof and an urge to generate electricity. ''Solar energy is more decentralized, so the industry sees more competition from solar than from wind,'' said Carsten Kornig, the managing director of the German Solar Energy Association. In the former East Germany, where scores of state-subsidized industries were shuttered after reunification in 1990, the solar industry is a welcome tonic for a depressed region. Signet Solar, an American maker of photovoltaic modules that use thin-film technology, chose to build its first factory and research center near Dresden. ''We decided right from the beginning to have our main R&D in Germany,'' said Gunter Ziegenbalg, Signet's managing director. Still, there are constant reminders of how quickly Germany could lose its status. Signet is building its next factory in Madras, India; Q-Cells is building one in Malaysia. Other German companies are exploring the Mediterranean markets, particularly Spain. With more sunny days a year, Spain is likely to have a competitive solar industry that can stand on its feet before Germany's does. And now it has put in place its own German-style incentives. ''To develop a technology, you've got to create an industry,'' said Mr. Milner, the chief executive of Q-Cells, referring to the German success story. ''You can wait and wait and wait for costs to come down, but it takes too long.''
Anton Milner, the chief executive of Q-Cells, on the headquarters roof at his solar company. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHIAS RIETSCHEL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. C1) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 772 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
This column about small-business trends in California and the West appears on the third Thursday of every month. E-mail: jamesflanigan@nytimes.com SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; ENTREPRENEURIAL EDGE; Pg. 8 LENGTH: 1156 words THAT Orange County, Calif., has become a center of small companies developing devices for eye care is no coincidence. Some of the companies were nurtured by a six-year-old private organization of more than two dozen top executives of corporations in the county. The organization, called Orange County Technology Network, or Octane, has so far created 27 companies, most in electronics and software technology, and biomedical devices, especially for eye care. ''It's innovation development, a variation on economic development,'' said Gary Augusta, executive director of Octane. Other small eye device companies can trace their origins to William J. Link, who earned an engineering doctorate from Purdue University and came to Orange County in 1977 to work for a hospital supply company. He went on to found two eye device companies, sell them, and with the proceeds join venture capital investors who finance health care companies. He has helped to finance 20 companies, half of them in Orange County. ''When companies get bought out, some of the people in them who owned shares find they have money,'' Mr. Link said. ''And if they are entrepreneurial, they get the confidence to start their own companies. So the industry multiplies over and over again.'' In all, there are 310 biomedical firms in Orange County, according to Octane, including several dozen developing implanted lenses, known as intraocular lenses, for use in cataract surgery, laser surgery for vision correction and instruments to alleviate glaucoma and other eye diseases. ''This area has the highest concentration of ophthalmic industry in the world,'' said Dr. Roger F. Steinert, professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of California, Irvine, which is closely involved in the Octane community effort. Every Thursday, Luis Vasquez of Octane goes to the Eye Institute at the university and listens as medical researchers tell him of ideas they have for businesses. Then he refers the ideas to the venture capital investors and entrepreneurial businesspeople who serve on Octane's 27-member board. ''There is a remarkable community here,'' said Dr. Steinert, who is helping to raise funds for a $50 million Eye Institute building at the university. The building will be named for Gavin S. Herbert, founder and former chairman of Allergan, the large pharmaceutical products company that first developed antiallergy eye drops 60 years ago in Los Angeles. Allergan moved its headquarters to Irvine in 1971. The industry grew over some three decades in an organic process of small companies being taken over by large ones, which spurred entrepreneurs to form and lead new companies. Mr. Link, for example, started in the business 31 years ago when he heard about a need for intraocular lenses to replace lenses clouded with cataracts. ''So I contacted an ophthalmologist friend of mine and we founded American Medical Optics to make such lenses,'' Mr. Link said in a recent interview. Mr. Link sold that company to Allergan in 1986 and then founded Chiron Vision, as an Orange County eye care subsidiary of the Chiron Corporation, the biotechnology firm based in Emeryville in Northern California. Chiron Vision succeeded with lenses and research into advanced eye care, and Mr. Link sold it to Bausch & Lomb of Rochester for $300 million in 1997. Mr. Link then became a venture capitalist at Brentwood Venture Partners and its successor firm, Versant Ventures. Eyeonics of Aliso Viejo, Calif., is a company founded by J. Andy Corley and Dr. J. Stuart Cumming in 1988. Mr. Corley worked with Mr. Link at American Medical Optics and at Chiron Vision. At Eyeonics, he changed the industry by persuading Medicare to let patients pay surgeons extra and directly for specialized lenses. ''Cataract surgery is the most common operation performed, three million a year in the United States,'' Mr. Corley said in an interview. ''But Medicare in recent years started cutting remuneration for the procedure and private insurers did the same.'' So Eyeonics has developed what Mr. Corley called a premium lens that not only replaced the cataract but reduced the need to wear eyeglasses afterward for reading. ''Baby boomers don't want to wear glasses,'' Mr. Corley said. ''They want to preserve the youthful lifestyle, and they're willing to pay for it.'' Eyeonics made $34 million in revenue for its premium lenses last year, he said. Cataract surgery costs up to $2,000 an eye while surgery that installs the premium lenses can cost $5,000 an eye, according to data supplied by Eyeonics and physicians. Mr. Corley sold Eyeonics last February to Bausch & Lomb for an undisclosed sum that he said exceeded $80 million. Impressed with the entrepreneurial environment in Orange County, Bausch & Lomb is transferring some research functions to the Eyeonics location, which Mr. Corley will manage. Thomas J. Berryman, who founded WaveTec Vision Systems in Aliso Viejo, Calif., in 2005 with $5 million in venture capital from Mr. Link's Versant Ventures, noted in an interview that the demands of eye care change as technology advances. ''Many young people have Lasik surgery these days, and that changes the calculations on their lenses when they come to need cataract surgery,'' Mr. Berryman said. ''This presents problems for surgeons who guarantee a certain level of vision perfection as a result of their operations.'' WaveTec Vision has responded by developing an instrument that attaches to the surgical microscope, allowing the doctor to have a more precise measurement of a patient's corrected vision. The company has run trials of the device on 300 patients, has raised $18 million in venture capital and hopes to achieve commercial operation next year, Mr. Berryman said. Another eye device company is the Glaukos Corporation, headed by Thomas W. Burns, who worked with Mr. Link at Chiron Vision and was recruited by him in 2002 to be president and chief executive. Mr. Link serves as chairman of Glaukos, which is in Laguna Hills, Calif. Inspiration for the company came from a financier in Orange County, Olav Bergheim, whose son suffered from glaucoma and required high-risk surgeries. ''We founded this company,'' Mr. Burns said, ''to develop a safer microinvasive procedure to treat glaucoma.'' Glaukos, with help from Dr. Richard Little, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, Irvine, developed an infinitesimal titanium stent that can be implanted in the eye to drain fluid and thus reduce the pressure that leads to glaucoma. The company, backed by $55 million in venture capital, has completed its clinical trials and hopes to secure approval for the device by mid-2009, Mr. Burns said. Noting the intense levels of activity among the hundreds of biomedical companies in Orange County, Mr. Augusta summed up one of Octane's tasks this way: ''We have 400 jobs open and must attract the people.'' Download 5,58 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
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