Anish Kapoor is watching an assistant stick tiny trees on an architectural maquette with hairspray.
“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” the sculptor asks. “It’s just the wrong smell for this”.
Kapoor, 54, is setting up an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, “Place/No Place: Anish Kapoor in Architecture” (through Nov. 8). There are cavities, concavities, spheres and funnels everywhere, representing works made, in the making, or never made.
The models include Chicago’s stainless-steel “Cloud Gate” sculpture - nicknamed “The Bean” - and the huge, double- ended horn shown at Tate Modern in 2002-3 (”Marsyas”).
Indian-born Kapoor smiles at me amiably. The sleeves of his dressy white shirt are rolled up, and he keeps a close eye on his crew, even when interviewed.
Kapoor keeps busy. He has a show at Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim next month (Nov. 30 to Feb. 1), and another in 2009 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which won’t be a retrospective. (”I’m still around and working”, he says.) In 2011, he will fill Paris’s 19th-century Grand Palais as Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer did. “That’s a hard one, let me tell you”,  he says. (Bloomberg)