In a recent shelf piece, "western hills," Mr. Steinbach devises an intricate exchange about color, patriotism, machismo and violence among three chunky forms: a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a red-bearded sheriff, an aluminum garbage can made in the United States (and gleamingly proud of it) and a child's stacking toy involving colored rings.
Mr. Clinton's staff moved into his new office on 125th Street last week while he awaited finishing touches on the space, which is furnished with off-the-shelf pieces from Manhattan design stores.
Plan I: Pret-a-Porter "We used off-the-shelf pieces that would require a minimum amount of craft," said Robert Young, who did the design with his partner, Shea Murdock, of Murdock Young Architects.
That is a bargain-basement price compared with most equipment the United States and other countries send into space, and the Bigelow agreement could serve as a model for how NASA puts together missions at lower costs by using a Kmart strategy: buying off-the-shelf pieces instead of developing its own designs.
In the gloom inside, distributed among six shelves, pieces of Byzantine ship were entering a new phase of existence.
Advanced Tissue Sciences, a small, publicly held company in La Jolla, Calif., wants to sell off-the-shelf pieces of cartilage — cultivated from cadavers or umbilical cords — that surgeons can cut and fit to any patient.
Some of the prototypes were pieced together from his collection; others were modified versions of displays other enthusiasts had put together; others were built entirely from off-the-shelf pieces.
The decision to use a mostly off-the-shelf piece for the launch of a potentially disastrous product line (the iPad could easily have been bad, or at any rate unpopular) was one of economy; why go to the great expense of truly redesigning a chip, when tweaking an existing design will serve, and for a fraction of the cost?
And Fu Manchu provided an off-the-shelf piece of shorthand to express it.
