Scritch, scritch, scritch. The faint sound of William Katavolos etching his imaginings onto paper is audible over the whoosh and thump of pumps moving thousands of gallons of water through his lair at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute--a concrete-block subbasement where steam pipes hiss overhead and the air has the faint chlorine whiff of swimming pools. Katavolos's felt-tip marker is scratching a handy piece of notebook paper, shaping pipes and arches, pools and columns, in broad pen strokes.
Katavolos can't explain anything important without a pen and a piece of paper. Any kind of paper will do: yellow, white, or lined, notebook or scrap. As he draws, he talks: of social movements, vast planned communities, surprises and revolutions. His ambitions are big, like his circle of acquaintances, which has extended from physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman to abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. His conversation shifts easily from ...
