One Man, Nine Times

As packs of suited businesspeople made their way through the lobby of Lever House, several unexpected visitors stopped the lunchtime crowd in its tracks. Scattered throughout the space were nine male figures — each 8 feet tall and rendered in polyurethane — standing mid-stride. Their eyes closed, their bodies bare.

One passerby posed a question that cut straight to the chase: "Are there going to be naked women, too?"

The artist, Richard Dupont, halfway through the process of installing the sculptures, responded with a weary smile. "He's probably the 10th person who's asked me that today," Mr. Dupont said. The answer, for the record, is no. In fact, there's really only one man in the project — Mr. Dupont himself, whose human form, copied, manipulated, and then reproduced again, inhabits the lobby of Lever House in an installation called "Terminal Stage," which opens to the public today.

The project was five years in the making. It started when the art collector and owner of Lever House, Aby Rosen, commissioned Mr. Dupont, a sculptor with an interest in the relationship between the body and its environment, to create work for the Lever House Art Collection installation project. Other artists who have produced work for the collection include John Chamberlain, Jeff Koons, and, most recently, Damien Hirst.

For a previous project, Mr. Dupont had based his artwork on a three-dimensional model of his own head. But for this work, he wanted to reproduce his entire body. To create an exact replica, though, the artist had to locate a full-body laser scanner. "There aren't too many people who have these scanners," Mr. Dupont said. "Most of the options were in California near Hollywood, where they use them for special effects."

The artist, however, eventually located one at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where it was being used by a defense contractor, General Dynamics, to measure about 10,000 military personnel for the production of military gear. There, for $300, Mr. Dupont received a complete, three-dimensional photograph of his body.

But that was only the first step of the process. Since the scan captured the outline of Mr. Dupont's body, but not the details of his form, such as skin folds, the artist had to cast various sections of his body in plaster, then graft those data onto the larger form. As the casting process took 15 months and required the artist to maintain a consistent shape and weight, Mr. Dupont found himself having an unexpected constraint imposed on him: a diet. "I had to weigh myself every day and maintain that weight," Mr. Dupont said. And each time a cast was made, Mr. Dupont "had to make sure I hadn't just eaten a sandwich or something."

For all of its scrupulous attention to detail, though, "Terminal Stage" is intended to explore the notion of detachment. Mr. Dupont's interest in biometrics — the process of using bodily measurements and data such as fingerprints and retinal scans for identification and research purposes — dictates both his process (mathematically meticulous) and his product (deliberately anonymous). "I think of the body as just another material — a tool for the communication of an idea that we're being increasingly used for information," Mr. Dupont said. "This is less about being hyper-realistic than about being hyper-accurate," he said, adding: "I see these things as the ultimate anti-self-portraits."

Its exploration of the gulf between the personal and the public is also what lends "Terminal Stage" its site-specificity. Lever House is the first Modern structure built along the lines of the New York City sidewalk grid, and Mr. Dupont's installation is deliberately "off the grid," as the artist put it.

Mr. Dupont has learned, however, that sometimes, hyper-accuracy isn't all it's cracked up to be. Asked whether he has ever considered using someone other than himself as a model for his work, Mr. Dupont said his one attempt at doing so yielded disastrous results. "I did my wife early on, and it was monstrous," he said. "I had her 9 feet tall and in terrible khakis. She hated it."

Until May 3 (390 Park Ave., at 53rd Street).