At A Real-Life Santa's Workshop, Christmas Comes Early

Lou Nasti runs a factory in Brooklyn that makes animatronic Christmas displays. He's been at it for almost 44 years.

Neda Ulaby/NPR Lou Nasti runs a factory in Brooklyn that makes animatronic Christmas displays. He's been at it for almost 44 years.

Neda Ulaby/NPR

"Everyone calls me Geppetto," announces Lou Nasti. "I mean, look at me: The glasses, the gray hair — and I play with dolls. Come on."

Being with Nasti at his Brooklyn company, Mechanical Displays Inc., is like hanging out in Santa's workshop. The walls are lined with tools and dozens of molds for elf heads, all in different sizes. Dancing mice and snowmen are being prepped in a chorus line for HBO's headquarters in Manhattan. For another display, a plush mother polar bear is being wired to cuddle her baby. Life-size toy soldiers stand by a life-size talking tree, a current work in progress.

For almost 44 years, Nasti has created holiday-themed displays for department store windows and shopping malls, the kind featuring animatronic elves wrapping presents, sweet-faced reindeer bowing their heads and Santa snoring, perhaps with a tail-wagging puppy at his feet.

"I have worked for the king of Morocco," says Nasti. "I did the B. Altman's window for 18 years prior to their going out of business. I did Gimbels. I've worked for Macy's Santa Land."

Nasti's displays have been seen in most of New York City's major department store windows. He started as a window dresser as a teenager and landed on the front page of The New York Times when he built a giant robot that could walk and talk. A few years later, he started his company.

Mechanical Displays has sold thousands of holiday displays across the United States. One Christmas, Nasti remembers installing a display at a department store in Ohio and peeking into the window of a Hudson's across the street ... where workmen were putting in another of his displays, one he'd sold years earlier to a store in Minneapolis. Some circulated from store to store. Others stood out for other reasons.

"Many years ago we did an animated Nativity for Macy's," Nasti recalls. "We put it in the window, and we had baby Jesus moving, and Mary and Joseph. Very discreet. Very, very discreet. They got calls! Macy's got calls that it was disrespectful to animate baby Jesus. He wasn't crying or anything; it was very well done!"

Over the past few decades, the market for these figures with their repetitive motions and uncanny fixed stares has changed. Online shopping put a dent in department store budgets and changed their priorities.

"The department stores have cut back," Nasti grumbles, "because they want to fill every square inch with retail."

Nonetheless, Nasti remains busy. He just finished building a children's train ride through a sprawling peppermint forest for the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Ky. The project, he says, was huge.

"Thirty thousand lights, 150 Christmas trees, 30 rolls of Dacron, 250 pounds of poly loose snow, and 90 animated figures making candy canes and gingerbread and having a party in the forest," he says proudly. "I mean, I got teddy bears warming their feet on fireplaces and squirrels toasting marshmallows. It's adorable."

“ The hardest Christmas tree there is to put up is in my own home. At that point, I've had it.

- Lou Nasti

Nasti says he's built just about everything he's ever dreamed of — except one thing: a full-size theme park, where actual people would visit, filled with his mechanical figures.

"I want to call it Nasti Land," he grins.

But before Nasti Land, Nasti has one more Christmas chore to perform — the only one he dreads.

"The hardest Christmas tree there is to put up is in my own home," he says. "At that point, I've had it."

Christmas starts for Nasti in February, when he starts gearing up for the year's work. And his holiday season is not over until the middle of January, when he finishes taking down and repairing his displays.

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A Look At Brazil's Big Dreamer, Architect Oscar Niemeyer

Hide caption One of Oscar Niemeyer's earliest projects, built in the early 1940s, came to be known as the "Pampulha architectural complex." It was commissioned by Juscelino Kubitschek, who would later become president of Brazil. At the time, he was mayor of Belo Horizonte. The complex included a church, which was initially refused for consecration by the Roman Catholic Church. Hide caption By the late 1950s, Kubitschek was president of Brazil, and he invited Niemeyer to design many of the civic buildings in the country's new capital of Brasilia, including the Palacio da Alvorada, the official residence of Brazilian presidents, pictured here in 2006. Hide caption A church, pictured circa 1955 on the grounds of the presidential palace, is connected to the palace by an underground hallway. Hide caption The Oscar Niemeyer Museum, inaugurated in 2002, the largest museum in Latin America, is in Curitiba, the capital of the state of Parana, Brazil. Curitiba, considered an outstanding example of urban planning worldwide and the ecological capital of Brazil, was chosen as one of the 12 host cities for the 2014 soccer World Cup. Hide caption Brasilia Cathedral was inaugurated by President Juscelino Kubitschek in 1960. Hide caption Brasilia's National Museum, inaugurated in 1960. Hide caption Construction for the headquarters of the French Communist Party began in the late 1960s. Hide caption "The Volcano" at Le Havre Cultural Center, France, built in 1982. Hide caption The Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art near Rio de Janeiro, built in 1991. Vanderlei Almeida/AFP/Getty Images Hide caption Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Center of Asturias, Spain, built in 2006. Hide caption Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer in Ravello, Italy, on the day of its inauguration. Roberto Salomone/AFP/Getty Images Hide caption A pianist at Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer in Ravello on the day of its official inauguration in 2009, with Italy's Amalfi coast in the background. Roberto Salomone/AFP/Getty Images Hide caption The inauguration of the Oscar Niemeyer foundation building in Niteroi, Brazil, 2010. Hide caption Part of Niemeyer's foundation building in Niteroi, Brazil, 2010.

There are a number of ways to leave a legacy. Some people have kids. Some become president. Or you can build unforgettable buildings that define the landscape.

Throughout his 104 years, architect Oscar Niemeyer defied the rules and even cheated death for a long while, working well into his last years. He died Wednesday of a respiratory infection and received a fitting tribute in this obituary in The New York Times.

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer looks at drawings for a project of two cities in Senegal, Africa, in his office in Rio de Janeiro, 1992.

Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images

Design was in Niemeyer's blood. He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907 to a graphic artist, his father.

After working with the legendary Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the commissions flowed.

Niemeyer's biggest task, starting in 1956, was effectively to design Brasilia from the ground up when it was chosen as Brazil's new capital in the country's interior. He was the chief architect responsible for many public buildings — a unique opportunity to determine the look and feel of an entire city in just a few years.

He broke all of the molds, lived and breathed outside the proverbial box and eschewed the expectations he had inherited. Politically, he was aligned with the far left, which complicated his career at times, especially during years of military dictatorship in Brazil and during the Cold War.

Philosophically, Niemeyer defied the axiom of contemporary modernists that "form follows function."

As Niemeyer put it: "Form follows beauty."

In a 2005 interview in the New York Times Magazine, Niemeyer said, "The ultimate task of the architect is to dream. Otherwise nothing happens."

And in Niemeyer's dreams, beauty was found in curved lines. Creativity flows from bending the straight lines of authority. Those ideas, in addition to his buildings and sculptures, are Niemeyer's legacy.

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Architect Designed Exuberant, Optimistic Places

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Oscar Niemeyer is virtually responsible for the strikingly modern look of Brazil's capital and co-led the team that designed the U.N. building in New York City. Neimeyer died Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 104.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Finally, this hour, we remember a giant of early modern architecture. Oscar Niemeyer died yesterday in a hospital near his home in Rio de Janeiro, just shy of his 105th birthday. Niemeyer is best known for designing the striking government buildings in Brazil's capital, Brasilia. He also co-led the team that designed the U.N. headquarters in New York City. And in 1988, he won architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. Edward Lifson has this appreciation.

EDWARD LIFSON, BYLINE: Oscar Niemeyer embodied the Kiyoka(ph), the native of Rio who enjoys life. He designed exuberant, sensuous, optimistic places for the people. Niemeyer created for Brazil and Brazil created him, says Alan Hess, author of two books on Niemeyer.

ALAN HESS: The beaches, the sun, the society, the friends, the women, the sensuality, the rhythm, the music, you definitely see that in his architecture.

LIFSON: Niemeyer was a young apprentice when he first worked with European master architect Le Corbusier in Brazil. Later, they would lead the design team for the U.N. in New York. But Niemeyer's masterpiece was his dramatic vision for underdeveloped land in central Brazil that became the country's capital in 1960. It declared a new modernity for an emerging Latin America - simple, curving shapes and a stunning cathedral in the form of a circular crown line an enormous promenade.

Niemeyer injected lyricism and emotion into the right angles and straight lines of European modernism, whose masters told him, says Alan Hess...

HESS: Oscar, you're going too far. You can't do that. And yet, he was so certain about himself that he reshaped modern architecture in an amazing way.

LIFSON: Brasilia was one of the grandest utopian dreams in history, but not long after it opened, Niemeyer's career took a hit. He was a staunch communist confronted by right wing dictatorships that ruled Brazil from the mid-1960s to the '80s, so Niemeyer moved to Europe. When he returned, he was in his 70s and ready for a second act. Among his highlights, a celebrated white flying saucer-shaped museum perched on the edge of the cliffs near Rio.

Last February, Niemeyer attended the reopening of this 1984 samba drome in Rio upgraded for the upcoming Olympics. Just a couple of years ago, in his spare time, Niemeyer put his poetry into words, writing this samba, a tribute to people living in Brazil's slums, called "Feeling Good About Life."

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LIFSON: Even left-leaning architects design for the wealthy. Although Niemeyer's communist sympathies made it hard for him to come to the U.S. in 1964, at the height of the Cold War, without visiting the site, he completed drawings for a house for lefty filmmaker Joseph Strick and his wife in Los Angeles. Jeremy Strick, now director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, grew up in that house.

JEREMY STRICK: There is just always a moment when people would arrive at the house and you would open the door for them and they would look in and they'd be looking from Le Mesa Drive, straight out across Santa Monica Canyon, the Santa Monica Mountains with the floor to ceiling windows. Always people would come up, there would be sort of a audible gasp.

LIFSON: Strick admires architect Oscar Niemeyer for bringing the same uplifting spirit to his civic buildings. And Niemeyer used to say, the important thing is not architecture. The important things are life, friends, and this unjust world that we must make better. For NPR News, I'm Edward Lifson.

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A Photographer's Mini Food Fascination

"When I was young the cones were so big you could drive a car through them."

Christopher Boffoli

Small stuff is having a big moment. There's skateboarding for your fingers, cupcake-size lasagna, and now we've discovered photography featuring food as a backdrop for miniature life. In a nutshell, that's the theme of Christopher Boffoli's Big Appetites series, on display at Seattle's Winston Wachter gallery through Dec. 21.

"If you consider how many museums are filled with ancient artifacts that are tiny representations of people and things ... you realize that we've been fascinated with miniatures for tens of thousands of years," Boffoli tells The Picture Show via email.

A family camps in a sugar cone forest; skiers take to the slopes of an ice cream sundae: Boffoli's photos seem to imagine the scenes that play out around our food when we aren't looking. But food itself also looms large in the images, which, according to Boffoli's website, represent "an American enthusiasm for excess, especially in the realm of food."

Boffoli describes his process as usually starting with the food. Then he dives into his collection of miniature props and figures to find a clever match. And once he's done, he'll often write a clever caption.

Boffoli tells The Picture Show that he was inspired by childhood films and TV shows — especially ones that showed tiny people in a normal sized world.

"One of the very first that made an impression was a recurring segment on Captain Kangaroo with these tiny people who lived in an animal cracker box behind the books on one of his bookshelves," Boffoli writes.

And he knows he's not alone in this niche genre. We featured a similar artist back in August, and an artist named Slinkachu has also gotten some recognition. Boffoli says he intended for his work to draw attention to a "cultural fascination with tiny things," and it's only natural that other artists would share that interest.

Boffoli is currently working on a book of these photos, which he expects to be released in fall 2013.

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