the interval of time

The first thing visible through the window is the Orrery: eight feet of stainless steel, gears stacked beneath a globe of crossing rings, each of its six planets ground from a stone chosen to resemble it. Mercury is a meteorite. Earth is Chilean lapis. Mars is red jasper from Namibia. A walnut lip runs around its base so that people can sit against it, which they do, with drinks.

Behind the bar, a generative painting by Brian Eno moves through its colors without repeating. Overhead, over four hundred laboratory flasks hang in numbered holders from a steel gantry, lit from above. Books climb the far wall to the ceiling and keep going, screening the offices on the mezzanine. Guests walk in and assume it is a library. Then there is the bar top: stone quarried at the site of the West Texas 10,000-year clock, cast in resin, its curves left by the carving. A cabinet of curiosities fits beneath the stairs. Elsewhere in the room, a robot draws on a chalkboard.

// Continued on PAGE 172 in VOLUME I //

PHOTOGRAPHY // Thom Milkovic