Everything, from the wry photos depicting people waiting that are hung in the lifts, to the white plaster hands reaching out of the spa walls bearing white flowers, candles and feathers, is by Starck and is unique.
An oversized garment suspended from its hem and adorned with false military emblems is the most memorable component, although another work, which projects slides of suffering people over a wall of white plaster hands, carries considerable emotional weight.
Free glasses for poor children is an admirable aim; Yves Béhar's colourful plastic specs are a contemporary, global version of the round, wire-framed John Lennon-style NHS glasses that generations of British schoolchildren wore, often held together with a stretch of plaster handed out by the school nurse.
Unsurprisingly, however, the real spectacle is found below, in Interstate's dimly lit basement-turned-Purgatory. Here, Leyva's vision is realized through eerie projections of religious and pop culture images on tall, church window screens and candle-lit plexiglas tubes, cupped by plaster hands.
A corps of cast-plaster hands (shades of Rodin) form shadow-puppet swans in midair, their pinched white fingers evolving into crystalline heads and black beaks.
It's sleek, chic and modern, like a big living room, with parquet floors, large abstract oil paintings, and buff-colored plaster walls, hand finished.
He digitized it so the world would get to see the remarkable film, along with the "making of" materials, which included making a plaster cast hand that could be used to map the polygon vertices into a 3D model.
Old plaster and hand-lettered signs are still visible on the bare brick walls, a city's palimpsest.
The walls were stripped down to their lathing, and the new plaster was hand-buffed with beeswax, creating a sheen that, as Ms. Spellman points out, "looks incredible in candlelight".
Marisol has endowed him with two sets of plaster cast hands, perhaps a symbol of his expansive creativity.
Rinse wet plaster off hands in a bucket of water before washing them in the sink.
