Content area
Full text
On a plane to Teheran 18 years ago, architect Theodore Liebman overheard a conversation that changed his notion of foreign trade. Two passengers struck a deal to exchange cement for beans, peas and chickens.
So when his Manhattan-based firm, Liebman Melting Partnership, was approached this year by a trader proposing to finance the construction of a new community in Russia by selling scrap metal from the country's Baltic Fleet, Mr. Liebman was hardly surprised. "The line between trade, development and professional services is much more muddied in the rest of the world than it is here," he says.
In the 3-1/2 years that Liebman Melting Partnership has been working in former Soviet bloc countries that lesson has struck home again and again. Its design and planning projects range from enlarging an agricultural village outside Berlin to redeveloping and restoring 13th century buildings in Prague.