The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 149

OCTOBER 7, 2007 Boston Sunday Globe Arts Entertainment N5 Start smart. Globe home delivery Architecture lr life. -r. fir 4 1 i Call today 1-888-MY-GLOBE FOR TICKETS AND INFORMATION CALL fire! Limited-time offer. Pricing valid for 12 weeks for new subscribers in Globe delivery area.

BRUCE T.MARTIN Architect Howard Elkus says the inspiration for his design for Neiman Marcus in Natick was a dress he designed for his wife. A store makes the best-dressed list The age-old battle of the sexes and some of the most sublime music ever written. Stellar cast Semi-staged. Sung in Italian. English titles.

Fri. Oct. 12 Sat. Oct. 7:30 NEC's Jordan Hall 617.484.9200 bostonbaroque.org iSs Celebrity Series of Boston Dame Kiri Te Kanawa soprano Warren Jones piano Farewell Recital Tour Recital to include works by Mozart, R.

Strauss, Duparc, Poulenc, Britten and more. a Partner Sean Curran Company WORLD MUSIC 617.876.4275 1 BUY ONLINE AT www.WORLPMUSIC.org BOSTON' BAROQUE 1 Martin Peartman, Music Director Sponsored by Media Partner: GZJ 2007 Nov 29-Dec 29 The Opera House the BEST SEATS bostonballet.org lif tti llll Program to include AriaApology, Metal Garden and the world premiere of Social Discourse. (See website lor lull program) The 2007-2008 Dance Series is sponsored by: The Little Family Foundation and EMERSON COLLEGE 'The Wrap' adorns the new Natick Neiman Marcus By Robert Campbell GLOBE CORRESPONDENT NATICK Does it look like a great tattered banner, whipping in a storm? Or maybe an enthusiastic Wave at Fenway? Or is it more like a soft breeze blowing through the delicately lay-ered fabric of a woman's high-fashion dress? Whatever it looks like, it is, in actual fact, a huge wordless billboard that wraps most of the new Neiman Marcus store that opened two weeks ago here. We'll call it the Wrap. Big and powerful, yet subtle and delicate, the Wrap is a terrific piece of architecture.

At the same time, it's the kind of architecture like, say, the Eiffel Tower, or the Hancock that you wouldn't want to see more than once in a city. If every new store sought such a commanding presence, our world would look like a World's Fair of competing show-offbuildings. That said, this is a stunning design. It's enormous, 40 feet high and the length of two football fields. It's made of sheets of stainless steel, attached to one another like the patches in a' quilt.

They come in several colors. The colors are supposed to make you think right away of Neiman's subdued, high-end aesthetic. And it's the way the colors are patterned that creates the wispy, breeze-blown effect. The architect says the inspiration was, indeed, a dress. A particular dress, in fact.

One that he once designed for his wife to wear to a music festival in England. "Bronze. Champagne. Silver. The classical colors," says Howard Elkus, the architect, a partner in the Boston firm of Elkus Manfredi.

And indeed, the billboard does set the color key for Neiman's interior, which is a symphony of skin tones, as if Max Factor had been hired to design both the interiors and the products they display. In actual fact, interior finishes are by a firm called Burdifilek, of Toronto. It's the Wrap, not the interior, that's the interesting architecture. It's a grand sculpture that responds to the scale of the highway and the city. It announces the presence of Neiman's, and the mall of which it's a part, from a considerable distance.

You certainly wouldn't want to see it anywhere near Beacon Hill, but out here in the trackless, vacuous sub- BOSTON BALLET 71n fT' 1 ri I 1 I'll I I -iilMftT I if MfKKO HtSSIHfH Arrjlif Director dr -v Tthe NutcRackeR The Wrap is made of sheets of stainless steel in several colors, attached to one another like the patches in a quilt. The colors are supposed to bring to mind Neiman Marcus's aesthetic. Prpsfntfd by State Street. ORDER NOW for ticketmaster.com (O) I urbs (sorry, Natick), it focuses the urbanscape. The Wrap is an example of a style of architecture usually roadside architecture that was more common before the arrival of today's boring interstates.

These were buildings that announced themselves by their shape, a shape bold enough to catch your eye through a moving windshield. The Brown Derby restaurant, in Los Angeles, which looked like a brown derby, is one classic case. The milk bottle in front of the Boston Children's Museum, originally an ice cream stand in Taunton, is another. The first says "Gentlemen," the second says "Milk," in the same way the Wrap now says "Women's Fashion." The Wrap participates in another, more recent tradition, too. Elkus claims that he wasn't influenced by the recent work of California architect Frank Gehry.

He isn't persuasive. It was Gehry who pioneered the use of sheets of metal such as titanium and stainless steel in curvy, sculptural shapes, in such famous buildings as Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum, in Spain. Like some of Gehry's, Elkus's metal doesn't pretend to be a real part of the building. It stands clear of the actual store, which is more or less a box. This is a billboard that tells you it's a billboard, and gains in strength and authenticity by doing so.

At first look, you might think the Wrap is an example of so-called "branding," like the endlessly repeated brand image that is the ugly arch of McDonald's. The Wrap example style of architecture usually architecture that was common the arrival today's interstates. BRUCE T. MARTIN ing the slight branches. Neiman's is part of a larger development.

This is an expansion of the old Natick Mall, first built in 1965. The developer is General Growth. Besides Neiman's, there's a Nordstrom, a Sel de la Terre restaurant, and other enterprises. What makes the new mall unusual, though, is that it includes housing. Elkus Manfredi has designed 215 condos, now under construc tion, in a tower right behind Neiman's.

Called "Nouvelle at Natick" (admittedly, a dreadful name), it will offer its residents their own private entrance to the mall. I believe this is the first time new housing has been added to an existing shopping mall in the United States. I've argued for decades that the best place to build elderly housing is the parking lots of shopping malls. Nouvelle isn't particularly aimed at the elderly, but it still makes sense. The mall for its residents, a mixed-use downtown you can walk to.

Nouvelle is selling slowly. But if it catches on well, General Growth owns more than 200 other sites. Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobeaol.com. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players explore the finest of this intimate musical genre on four Sunday afternoons at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall. is an of a roadside more before of boring SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2007 at 3pm with Lars Vogt, piano DVOrvAK Quintet in A for piano and strings, Op.

81 BRAHMS (arr. Bpustead) SerenadeNo.iinD.Op.il CRITICS' PICKS VISUAL ARTS Facing the future "Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey" features portraits of students at Lawrence High School and Phillips Academy, as well as teenagers in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. In his photographs, Bey focuses on gently uncovering the truth of his subjects, and the results are like many teens themselves by turns frustrating and compelling. At the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, through Dec. 30.

978-749-4015, www.andover.eduaddison Japanese treasures "Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection" is a traveling show drawn from one of the best private repositories of Japanese art outside Japan, including paintings, lacquer ware, ceramics, and textiles. Organized by the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin, it tackles nine centuries of cultural history, with a particular regard to Chinese influences. At the Museum of. Fine Arts through Jan.

13. 617-267-9300, mfa.org Cate McQuaid But in fact the Wrap is the opposite of branding. Neiman's philosophy is that every store should look as different as possible from every other store. "They wanted architecture that can't be seen anywhere else in this world," says Elkus. Some of the landscape is by noted landscape architect Martha Schwartz, of Cambridge.

Her delicate white birches stand as a foil to the Wrap, as if the same wind that whips the fabric folds were bend- OSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PIAYEIS TICKETS: $30, $22, $17 FOUR-CONCERT SERIES: $1O0, $74, $58 Tickets may be purchased by visiting bso.org, at 617-266-1200, or at the Symphony Hall Box Office. On the day of the concert, tickets are only available at the Jordan Hall Box Office, which is located at 30 Gainsborough Street. Visit bSO.prg for additional series dates. Ail programs and artists are subject to change..