Lou Reed Walks The Styled Side

To be at the benefit party held on Saturday night for Robert Wilson's Watermill Center was to be in a Fellini movie, but without the maestro there to call "Cut!"

The unfinished three-story building, which used to be a Western Union laboratory, is impressive by daylight - but by night, transformed by candles and floodlighting, it was deliciously surreal: an unfinished carapace of some strange architectural insect.

The center was founded by Mr. Wilson in 1992 as an international facility for new work in the arts. Over 100 students have participated in summer projects, working with established professionals such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, Isabelle Huppert, Miranda Richardson, Dominique Sanda, and Tom Waits.

Three Spaces

Productions developed at the facility have included "Hamlet: A Monologue," "Time Rocker," and the Edinburgh Festival production of "Orlando."

Future productions include a project about the new millennium with David Bowie, Susan Sontag's adaptation of Ibsen's "Lady From the Sea," and a production of Schubert's "Winterreise" with Jessye Norman, who spoke at the benefit.

The evening might be described in three spaces: the building itself, the concert area, and the tent where dinner and an auction were held. And what a tent it was - you could have held the World Series under it in comfort. Not only were there dining tables with chairs in little jackets of white quilted satin, but there were banks of interlocking white divans grouped around oversized white coffee tables where guests could recline like Turkish pashas.

Models To Moguls

The crowd was thick with models, including Lauren Hutton, affluent members of the downtown art scene, a mogul in a suit the color of mint ice cream, an Indian rajah, rich dowagers, and shaven-headed refugees from Greene Street.

With the help of dozens of interns, the building was transformed for the evening - walls covered with draped fabrics, bowls filled with flowers and fruit and vegetables, beautiful objects posed amid the rubble of construction. A candlelit walkway led guests out into the woods to a newly installed, and floodlit, circle of monolithic standing Sumba stones.

The two-story rehearsal room, which on this evening held Mr. Wilson's famous chair collection and a skein of flying ceramic geese, was the largest space, but each room surprised or pleased.

In one room there was nothing but a low oak table massed with lilies, and in another cell-like space were three narrow, white-sheeted beds and a poster of Chairman Mao. One room in the basement was carpeted with gravel, which visitors crossed by way of a path of stepping stones.

But the movie set quality came from the contrast between the evening's luxury and the raw, gutted feel of the unfinished building - doorways hacked through old brick, white gauze hanging against ancient peeling paint, rare artifacts juxtaposed with the raw wood and metal of an unsheetrocked room.

In one place the original telephone exchange still hung from a wall, its plugs and cables covered in dust.

On To The Stage

The building, which will eventually disappear under paint and plaster like an actress beneath her makeup, was an artwork in itself. A flight of stairs down to a bare concrete block room, carpeted half in sod and half in gravel, led to a chair-filled space, between the two wings of the building, which sloped down to the concert stage.

There, against banks of conifers rippling with changing light effects, her songspeak voice androgynously deepened by the microphone and the languid notes of her violin reverberating against the looming walls of the center, Laurie Anderson opened the evening's performance.

The concert ended with a poignant duet between her and Lou Reed. But not before the hallucinatory feeling of the evening had been encapsulated by Mr. Reed, 1960s counterculture incarnate, grinding out songs of the underclasses to an audience that had paid no less than $500 to be there and that, except for a couple of hard-core fans, was visibly unmoved by his performance.

Where Was Nico?

There's a scene in "La Dolce Vita" where Nico (who later sang with Mr. Reed in The Velvet Underground) leads a dancing conga line of drunken revelers through the gardens of a palazzo.

As partygoers on Saturday made their way down the long, wood-chip-covered driveway, having had their car numbers radioed ahead by cell phone, one could almost see her through the dark, leading the fat man in the mint suit, the shaven-headed art tarts, the pearl-laden socialites, the gaunt models, and the freeloading press into the night to the strains of "Sweet Life in the Hamptons."