THE UTOPIANS.

A little more than a year ago, over the Christmas holidays, I descended in a small helicopter onto a stretch of pristine white sand. The beach, set against a striking coral cliff some ninety feet high, lay just east of a golf course--one of the last designed by the late Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Not a building was in sight. This was in the Dominican Republic, on the less travelled north coast, fronting the Atlantic, and I had been invited there by Boykin Curry, who stood on the sand with his fiancée, Celerie Kemble, waving a towel in the air to greet me.

Five minutes later, as I floated in the surf, a young American couple approached from the direction of a nondescript hotel called the Occidental, situated beyond the cliff. Noticing the helicopter, the woman said, "Now that's the way to travel like millionaires. Is it very expensive?" She likely assumed that Curry, sunburned in a faded red bathing suit and a pink T-shirt, and with windblown dark curly hair, was staying at the Occidental as well--a fellow-gringo living it up on the cheap in a country with a per-capita G.D.P. of only sixty-five hundred dollars.

But Curry, who is forty, was a highly successful money manager from Manhattan. He owned the course, the cliffs, the mountains behind the cliffs, the rolling jungles in between, the bluffs out to the east--everything in the area, as far as the eye could see, except for the Occidental. And even that was just a matter of time; he and Kemble, a thirty-two-year-old interior designer, already controlled the hotel's water supply, beach access, and electricity, and were in negotiations to buy and demolish it.

A few months earlier, acting on a tip from a friend of Kemble's, Curry had flown down, drafted a prospectus, and corralled a group of friends, including the musician and eco-activist Moby, the television interviewer Charlie Rose, and the foreign-policy whiz Fareed Zakaria, to help buy an enormous tract of land, known locally as Playa Grande, or Big Beach, and establish what he called a Creative Person's Utopia. ("We are going to keep it Bohemian, and not filled with dentists who got lucky in the stock market," he wrote in one pitch letter.) Except for the golf course, the twenty-two-hundred-acre plot--nearly three times the size of Central Park--was unspoiled. They picked it up for fifty million dollars.

After my swim, I climbed back into the helicopter with Curry and Kemble, and we began touring the property, which extends about five miles along the coast, flanked by a nudist colony and a Rochester doctor's retirement mansion. As Curry elaborated on his vision, it emerged that the utopia he had in mind was a twenty-first-century, jet-setting variety, in which golf, a game he does not play, could be used to subsidize an artists' colony and other noble pursuits. Curry's enthusiasms include organic subsistence farming, environmental conservation, and entomology. ("Boykin will do anything to have an insect named after him," Kemble told me.) He imagined a classical Athenian village--updated--in which four-star restaurants and art galleries could share street space with locally run fish shacks and pool halls; with great public plazas, where Op-Ed columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman might gather to discuss antiterrorism strategy with Zakaria and Rose, and then join Moby and his friend Michael Stipe for a concert on the beach, followed by a nightcap with Matthew Barney, the "Cremaster" artist, observing the migration of the humpback whales, headed east to spawn near Samaná.

On the western edge of the golf course, Curry showed me a paved cul-de-sac that was overgrown with weeds-evidence of the Dominican government's aborted attempt to develop the property some years back. "See, sloth is our friend," he said. "They had the foresight, the vision, to keep it all together as one giant property, without breaking it up piecemeal--and the incompetence not to do anything with it. If they hadn't been so incompetent, there would be ten Club Meds here by now."

Sloth had not prevented the government from building the so-called North Coast highway, a potholed two-lane road used occasionally by wild pigs, through the middle of the property. Curry hoped to persuade the government to reroute the road behind the property line. After we left the helicopter and were driving west along the highway, headed to our hotel in the tourist town of Cabarete, which is known for its favorable kite-surfing conditions, one of the car's tires went flat. "The road here is not so pretty," the driver remarked.

"Good time to move it and repave it!" Curry said.

Although the Dominican peso had nearly doubled in value in the five months since he had first visited the country, Curry kept pointing out new things that he might like to buy: a large farm, owned by a family of Dominican sisters, adjacent to the lot's southeastern boundary; a radio tower in the neighboring town of Rio San Juan. As we walked into the lobby of a small hotel, which was apparently for sale at a price of a million dollars, and beheld a view of the waves crashing against the seawall below, Curry turned to me and said, "Just think, all this could be yours for the, price of a small Manhattan apartment."

Fareed Zakaria, who is a regular guest at the Aspen Institute, Davos, and other northern retreats, told me that he was attracted to the Dominican Republic as a potential tropical alternative. "I've never liked Florida, to begin with. It's basically not that attractive and not that warm," he said. "So if you go an hour further …"

Shortly after my arrival, the weather grew unreliable and rainy. Curry, Kemble, and I spent a fair amount of time waiting, eating, and looking out toward the ocean from the scallop-shaped golf clubhouse.

Even so, there were signs that the D.R. may finally be approaching Next Hot Destination status. Curry's friend George Mueller, an L.E.D.-lighting entrepreneur and one of the twenty "founding residents" of Playa Grande, had spotted a familiar face in first class on his flight down; it turned out to be Donatella Versace, who was staying at a new resort just west of the Puerto Plata airport. On the other hand, Mueller's luggage was confiscated after customs agents discovered camouflage pants in his bag-designer bell-bottoms--and tagged him as either a paramilitary threat or an easy shakedown victim. It took him two days to get his gear back.

Each of Curry's visits so far had been accompanied by one or two disenchantments. On his first stay, the drinking water had made him sick, and he now insisted on Evian, even for brushing his teeth. "This time, it's the mosquitoes and the weather," he said. One evening, when we went swimming, the water was surprisingly brisk, not unlike the breeze.

"This is like being in Maine, in June," Curry said. "And we're on a tropical island. This is about the worst thing I can say about a place." He dipped underwater, reëmerged with a cautious smile, and announced, "At Playa Grande, in the regime of Boykin Curry, all the pools will be eighty-eight degrees! I decree, as phase one of my utopian experiment!"

Curry's Manhattan apartment, on the twenty-seventh floor of the Trump building on Central Park South, has an enormous terrace that overlooks the still thriving vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, one of Curry's heroes. There, he gives what seem like weekly cocktail parties and fund-raisers for largely progressive causes (charter schools, the film "Hotel Rwanda") and candidates (Eliot Spitzer, John Kerry), with guests ranging from Barack Obama to Courtney Love. (For one such gathering, he and Kemble brought together the Dominican President, Leonel Fernández, the architect Richard Meier, Zakaria, the Bronx politician Fernando Ferrer, the ex-congressman Herman Badillo, and a former Miss Venezuela.) "They're kind of arbiters of a life style, in many ways," said Alice Ryan, who serves on the board of the artsy downtown club SoHo House. An old college friend of Curry's likens him to a blend of Jay Gatsby and Howard Hughes, or, anyway, of their more endearing qualities.

Ravenel Boykin Curry IV was born into a prominent banking family from Greenwood, South Carolina, that relocated to suburban New Jersey. He is the oldest of three children--his sister, Caroline, is an investor with the family firm, Eagle Capital Management, and his brother, Marshall, makes documentary films. ("Street Fight" received an Oscar nomination this year.) From an early age, Boykin was drawn to his father's bedtime stories, which tended to focus on Winston Churchill and Averell Harriman, and he became hooked on biographies, reading two or three a week and thereby falling prey to the corrupting influence of what he calls "survivor bias"--the notion that every dreamer ends up a great success.

Boykin dreamed, first, of being a prison warden, and in grade school drew up blueprints of futuristic compounds and cities--proto-utopias, really--for reforming criminals and solving homelessness. During summer camp, after sixth grade, he frequently skipped morning activities to read the Times in the stairwell; before long, he became convinced that the corporate tax code needed restructuring, and tried forming a political-action committee. (He still talks about being pulled from the soccer field one day to answer a phone call. It was from the I.R.S.)

In high school, Boykin spent his summers mostly alone, working on a peach farm that his family owned back in South Carolina, an experience that "made for a good college essay," he says. He was accepted at Yale, where, as a freshman, he got the idea to publish a book of fifty "Essays That Worked"-literary models of idiosyncratic self-presentation for ambitious high-school seniors. The book became a best-seller, and he was invited to be a guest on the "CBS Morning News," which was then anchored by his future business partner Charlie Rose. ("It's a little bit like what Roosevelt said about Churchill," Rose told me when I asked him about Curry recently. "He said, 'Winston has one. hundred ideas every day, of which four are very good.' And somebody added, 'Yeah, but that's four more than most people have.' ")

After graduating, in 1988, with a degree in economics, Curry got a job in management consulting--a dangerous career path, he now likes to say, because it encourages people to think that they can improve any situation with new and better ideas. Curry clearly didn't need much encouragement, and, having figured out a way to exploit the Pan Am shuttle's youth discount for easy frequent-flyer miles, spent his weekends hopping from Boston to New York to Washington and back, so that before long he could take free trips to Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Warsaw. In 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, causing bookstore chains to withdraw "The Satanic Verses" from their shelves, Curry and two college classmates established an 800 number and struck a deal with the book's publisher to fill the orders themselves.

He eventually attended Harvard Business School, and got an investment job in China. But he had no investment experience, and didn't speak the language, so he hired a family friend to accompany him as an interpreter, and taught himself one phrase, which he learned to say very well; roughly translated, it amounted to, "I only know how to say this one thing, so it would be great if you could keep talking in Chinese and I will simply nod and smile." Typically, the line drew a laugh, and gave the impression, to Curry's English-speaking colleagues, that he was fluent enough to joke around with the local businessmen. In 1997, he began running the Asia group at Kingdon Capital, a large and successful hedge fund. Today, in his investing for Eagle Capital, with his sister and his parents, Curry, who may be the least self-important money manager in town, preaches the dual principles of long-term perspective and unconventionality. "If anyone ever sees our stock portfolio and says, 'Oh, that's a great group of stocks,' then I am in trouble," he says. "I need people to see it and say, 'Why would you ever own all this stuff?'"

In the late nineties, by shorting foreign banks and construction companies before the East Asian crash, Curry made enough money to think about indulging his long-standing "Mosquito Coast" fantasy, as he called it.

For years, he had been scouting territories as varied as Ko Samui, the outskirts of Moscow, central Java, and the Hudson Valley, renting boats, hiring pilots, and exhorting girlfriends and classmates to accompany him in exploring potential Shangri-las. Some girlfriends were more willing than others. He met Celerie, a fourth-generation Palm Beach aristocrat, in 1998, and they became fast friends, each finding the other "a bit ridiculous," Curry says. She had studied English at Harvard, and, like Curry, she had travelled widely. But it wasn't until he took her island-hunting off Croatia, in 2003, that he saw in her enthusiasm a complementary utopian spark. It was Celerie who introduced him to her friend Delio Gonzalez, who in turn introduced him to the Dominican Republic. (Gonzalez, a Miami businessman, grew up in Santo Domingo. As one of the project's founding residents, he sees himself as a sort of chaperon for Boykin and Celerie. "They come down here and dream these things up, and it's my job to make it work," he says.)

Conveniently, a billion-dollar embezzlement scandal, prolonged power failures, and rampant inflation had collapsed the Dominican peso, and brought the country to near-bankruptcy, prompting the I.M.F. to renew calls for the privatization of inessential state assets, chief among them a two-thousand-plus-acre proposed resort that had languished for years.

Curry's crowd is a Hamptons-going crowd, so a considerable component of the initial Playa Grande sales pitch involved playing up the convenience of the D.R. as an alternate A-list weekend refuge--"the new Hamptons," as Curry told me shortly after we first met. (By "new Hamptons," he later clarified, he meant "like the Hamptons were in the seventies.") Continental and American Airlines run frequent flights to the Dominican north shore that are, at least in theory, only three and a half hours long--surely no great deterrent for anyone accustomed to the Long Island Expressway.

In February of last year, Curry secured a private 737 jet for a weekend day trip to show the place off. For months, he had been asking acquaintances to name the ten New Yorkers they'd most like to invite to dinner, and, as the principal ingredient in his experiment in "creative meritocracy," he drew up a studiedly eclectic list of fifty people. Alongside the early movers (Moby, Rose, Zakaria), it included the New York Giants lineman Michael Strahan; the fashion-world salon Alex von Furstenberg; a former U.N. official, Nader Mousavizadeh; a couple of actors (Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, from "Law & Order: S.V.U."); Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University; and a New Jersey billboard executive named Drew Katz.

"It's almost like you're a casting director," Alice Ryan said. "Some people have got leading roles, some people have got nonspeaking parts, and some people are just extras. But absolutely everyone who is part of the production is valuable." Ryan counselled Curry, drawing on her own experience in recruiting for SoHo House. "With SoHo House, it wasn't, like, 'Oh, you're Barry Diller, of course we want you to be a member,'" she said, by way of explanation. "It was, like, 'Oh, you're Jamie King. And you work at Rockstar Games. And you're at the helm of something which is an extraordinarily exciting new venture.

"I think Boykin's been incredibly smart about how he has, quite frankly, just sorted out the riff from the raft," Ryan said. "He and Celerie--especially Celerie--have got such startlingly good taste, and not just that kind of good taste where it's, like, they know how to put a certain lamp with such and such a textile throw, and choose a paint color that's nice with the natural environment, but the practical aspect of putting together a place like that, and its feeling exceptionally special, but not so exceptionally special that it feels pretentious and you feel self-conscious."

The week before the trip, Curry looked over his invitation list. "It'll be interesting to see whether they interact," he said. "Do they like each other? Are there cliques? Or is it a bunch of people taking a free jet ride?"

The forecast called for rain, however, and Curry postponed the launch. ("A whole day of rain is unusual in the D.R.," he wrote, in an apologetic e-mail to the cast. "Now that you have some free time, I will be hosting a casual lunch on Saturday to watch the unfurling of The Gates, Christo's great project in Central Park. Our terrace on Central Park South should be a perfect vantage point.") When the time came for another try, three weeks later, clouds had reassembled over Playa Grande yet again. Scheduling conflicts had wilted the original guest list considerably: no Strahan, no Rose, no Moby, no Mousavizadeh, no Bollinger, no Zakaria (he was in Aspen), no Hargitay. Richard Meier, whose talents Curry hoped to enlist in designing the colony's artists' bungalows, cancelled on the morning in question, as did Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review.

Curry himself had flown down the night before, to prepare, so Kemble read an announcement on the plane. "How would you create the perfect retreat?" she said. "Forget about economics. Come up with something where, twenty years from now, you'll say, 'Wow!' I want you all to think like master planners. We've given you all notebooks and pens. There are lots of creative people on board, so let's see what you come up with."

After the plane touched down at Puerto Plata, everyone was herded onto a bus, which drove a hundred yards to the edge of the runway, where people boarded helicopters in small groups. Shortly before two-thirty, the helicopters--there were ten--began descending on a large, flat patch of green marked with makeshift white "X"s: the Playa Grande driving range, dressed up with masking tape. Golf carts were available for the remaining leg of the voyage--another hundred or so yards--to the clubhouse, where lunch was already waiting and men in Hawaiian shirts canting pineapple cocktails greeted the incoming guests.

Then, before anyone had finished eating, it began to rain, and Curry reluctantly cancelled the horses he'd reserved for those interested in exploring. Two hours passed, and it was time to go back to New York. Notebooks and pens were in scant evidence.

Six days later, many of the same crowd gathered, with greater cheer, in Palm. Beach; at the family home where Kemble grew up, for the Curry-Kemble wedding. The occasion was supervised by the event planner Bronson van Wyck, an old Groton friend of Kemble's, and the bride's dress was designed by Lela Rose, a Playa Grande founding resident who had also designed Jenna Bush's Inaugural dress. This time, Horida defeated the D.R. handily--the weather was perfect. The ceremony featured elaborate fireworks, a designated "Keeper of the Dog" (Curry and Kemble have a Jack Russell terrier named Anchovie), and an ABBA cover band, and received a two-page spread in Vogue.

Curry is in for roughly fifty per cent of the over-all Playa Grande investment, with the bulk of the twenty co-founders pitching in about a million dollars each. (Moby, who says he is "not much of a beach person," told me that he was drawn to "the possibility of being involved in a development project that wasn't guided strictly by avarice.") But Curry retains one-hundred-percent control over all decision-making. Dominican utopia is a benevolent dictatorship. It is also, within the confines of its limited avarice, supposed to make a profit, or at least break even.

As initially drawn up by the landscape architects Hart Howerton, whom Curry hired last spring, Playa Grande is to have four main geographical components, two of them more pragmatic than idealistic. For avid golfers, villas will be built to accompany the course at the west end; a luxury boutique hotel, operated by the Singapore-based chain Aman Resorts, will occupy the property's eastern edge. (Aman's founder, Adrian Zecha, maintains a hotelier's version of the utopian spirit: "Our basic philosophy is not to impose man-made design on the land but, rather, to have the land tell us what we should be doing.") On the higher ground between them will be farms, an equestrian center, a science research facility, and a nature preserve. The artists' colony, for a hundred artists in all, will be closer to the central beach village: twenty-five bungalows sold as quarter shares, at a steep discount--about fifty thousand dollars. By "artist," Curry means "anyone who does something that's intellectually interesting that doesn't pay very well." (He cited the columnist George Will and the thinker Esther Dyson as examples of people whose work he finds intellectually interesting.) But the artist must also be clubbable. ("No interest in J. D. Salinger, aura notwithstanding.")

"It's kind of like a MacArthur Fellowship, only not quite as exciting to receive the call," Curry said. "Actually, maybe we'll just wait until the MacArthur list is announced, and approach people, saying, 'Here's what you can do with your five hundred thousand dollars.'"

Curry is aware of the spotty legacy, over time, of such Edenic retreats as the Bohemian Grove, north of San Francisco, and the Mill Reef Club, in Antigua. (The Grove, now best known for rightwing magnates urinating on redwoods, once boasted members like Mark Twain, Jack London, and John Muir, before settling into what the sociologist G. William Domhoff calls "a quid pro quo arrangement between the rich and the talented.") Curry's solution is to ensure that "even the financial people are special," by approaching them himself. (Antonio Weiss, a founding member who works at Lazard, is also on the board of the Paris Review; Roberto Sella, a hedge-fund manager, produces olive oil on a farm in Italy.) And for the colony he plans to rely on what he calls "the Harvard model, instead of the country-club model," whereby an independent board offers admission and tenure is granted. "Even if you fall from grace and your latest book is a joke, you have a place," Curry says. (Legacies, however, are forbidden.) So far, the admissions board is made up of Moby, the journalist Lorne Manly, and Richard Meier, who, despite missing the jet trip, has signed on to the project with enthusiasm, relishing the "abnormal" opportunity, as he put it, to design a miniature city-state from scratch. "I don't know anyone rise who's done anything like this," he said.

Last summer, in an act of public-spirited good will, Curry offered to host a cattle auction down by the beach at Playa Grande. The auction is an annual event in the largely agricultural north-coast region, almost a secular holiday, and several hundred local farmers showed up to eat, drink, trade, and listen to music under a canopy of trees just beyond the shore. While the auctioneer shouted rapidly into a microphone, in Spanish, Jorge Cavoli, the mayor of Cabrera, the nearest town to the east, sought out Curry in the crowd and said that he had a public beach in need of several hundred thousand dollars' worth of renovation following a recent hurricane. They arranged to see it the next day; in the meantime, Curry wanted to examine some newly cleared brash on the property, so he, Kemble, van Wyck, and some friends and I wandered off down the beach, in the direction of one of the cliffs. Scaling the rocks proved challenging, and Kemble suggested installing a funicular. "Funiculars are for old people," Curry said, bounding ahead. At the top, he took in the view. Looking west--perhaps two hundred yards away, on another cliff, was the edge of the golf course--he said he might like to build a giant rope bridge connecting the two spots. More fanciful notions followed, such as a zip-line extending directly north from the cliff, above the beach, and into the ocean: the perfect splash entrance. But everyone wanted to know what would go in the clearing itself. "This is an ideal spot for a marriage proposal," a friend of Kemble's suggested.

"Just think how many weddings I can have here," van Wyck said.

Curry, who had been regarding an architectural scheme that identified the clearing as the site of something called the "Jungle Club," was flustered. "You're cheesifying my perfect moment!" he said, and turned away, squatting to examine a freshly chopped tree stump that appeared to be crawling with insects. "Have you ever read E. O. Wilson's books?" he asked me. He hoped to persuade Wilson to serve on the board of the science center.

The only efficient way to see much of the mountainous, southernmost terrain at Playa Grande is on horseback, so we set off to meet a guide, Anja, who would lead a tour. We found the horses grazing on the side of the road, under the only partially watchful eye of Anja, who had already finished one of the two bottles of rum she'd brought along for the ride. The other bottle she stuck in her boot as she exhorted everyone, without any instruction or helmets, to climb on a horse. We rode first out along a densely forested promontory to the water's edge, and then up-steeply, treacherously--into the hills. Anja brought out the second bottle of rum and passed it around. The sun had begun to set, and the ocean, judging from the absolute quiet and stillness; might have been hundreds of miles distant, as we descended into a valley, surrounded by orange and mango trees.

Like other local politicians in poor economies, Mayor Cavoli, who is thirty-seven and looks and dresses like a Miami accountant, is more interested in development than in enlightened preservation. He seemed unenthusiastic about the prospect of rerouting the highway. "I'll have to study it," he said, when I brought it up.

The day after the auction, while driving Curry and me to a recently restored cove--hints of what a little largesse could achieve--Cavoli drew attention to the smooth conditions of a side street and said, "We have paved these roads. Before, it was like the Old West." Then he called out, "Hey, who's that guy on the truck?," and pointed to the side of a large garbage rig, which was emblazoned with a smiling image of his face.

As we drove on, Cavoli described a plan of his own, which involved building a malacon, or promenade, along a desolate stretch of oceanfront rocks, which he hoped would spur still more commercial development. The hitch: it might cost half a million dollars to build. Curry, assuming his role as future employer and caretaker, asked about income taxes, wages, and health care. The immediate impetus for these questions was Anja, the horse guide, who had charmed everyone with her easygoing manner. It would be some time--years, at this rate--before leading horse tours around the property amounted to a full-time job at Playa Grande, and Curry hoped to find some other chores for her to do. ("Maybe she can drive people to the airport and back," van Wyck suggested, perhaps unwisely.)

A couple of weeks later, Curry sent me an e-mail:

         We have been talking further with Mayor Jorge of Cabrera, and
      have decided to help with the promenade and to endow an ongoing
      performance program every Friday evening. The performances will
      mix high and low, with classical music and outdoor films
      alternating each week with Dominican and pop bands. I think that
      will change the entire feel of the town.

Curry also authorized his utopia's first three capital investments: the 1,082-volume collection of Penguin classics, for an eventual Playa Grande library; an entire art installation from the P.S. 1 gallery, in Queens; and new irrigation equipment for the golf course.

"The project is like a creature: it's mutating and changing every day," the avant-garde architect Hernan Diaz Alonso told me, shortly after returning from a trip to Playa Grande in July. (Alonso, who calls Curry "a visionary," is the designer of the giant P.S. 1 installation--a "swirling composition of aluminum pipes and billowing fabric," according to the Times--that must now, somehow, be transported to the Caribbean.) Alonso was accompanied on the trip by Scott Johnson, a colleague of Richard Meier's. "We could really just jam about ideas and experiences," Johnson said. "I'd pick up this incredible leaf thing, and give it to Alonso and say, 'Hey, this is something you would be interested in,' because he comes at it from such a different approach. So it was like an exchange of ideas and creativity. I just want to be creative there."

Meier himself finally flew down in August, and raved about the Dominican citizenry, among other things: "They're very friendly and calm. They're always smiling all the time. Very happy people."

On the morning of December 31st, in Cabrera, Curry leaned out his car window to chastise a Dominican man for littering, and wound up in a shouting match. (Curry knows no Spanish; the Dominican knew enough English to respond, "Fuck you!") "Now I'm waiting for my Larry David moment," Curry said. "When the guy turns up on the town land-use commission."

He had a couple of bruises on his forehead from several days of boogie-boarding. He and Kemble had been down at Playa Grande since Christmas, entertaining sixty-odd guests--the biggest group yet--including some young children, and Anchovie. (The kids, one visitor remarked, all seemed to have exotic names, too: Dante, Heathcliff, Emerson.) Most of the guests were staying together at a hillside hotel in Cabrera that Curry had reserved for the week, and convening at regular intervals to share meals cooked by a rotation of chefs he'd flown in from New York. Charlie Rose had dropped by the previous day to play a round of golf before climbing into a helicopter bound for a resort on the opposite side of the island.

Earlier that week, Curry had closed on the purchase of the Occidental hotel, and with any luck the bulldozers would be arriving to level the place by the end of the peak season--say, April. He had also signed an agreement with the government's Environmental Ministry to co-manage the science center. ("We'll pay for building the center, and they'll pay for the scientists," he said. "Actually, we'll probably end up paying for that, too.") President Fernández had lent his moral support, at least, to the rerouting of the highway.

Curry had been looking forward to New Year's Eve as an occasion to demonstrate his commitment to the native community. He intended to throw a party for the residents of Cabrera: fireworks in the town's central square, followed by an open bar. Mayor Cavoli quickly nixed this, and suggested as an alternate location the site of his proposed malacon.

Curry, Kemble, and Delio Gonzalez, the self-appointed realist, planned first to drop m on some friends for lunch on Turks and Caicos, near the Bahamas, which required taking a helicopter and then a small plane, affording plenty of time for year-end reflection. Richard Meier's office had recently produced a sort of fluid city plan, for the five hundred acres nearest the main beach, and included with it sample home designs, such as a studio "cube," equipped with solar panels, and a modernist tree house, allowing even for the possibility, in some cases, of submerging buildings into the slope, leaving earthen roofs. (Kemble, who has wrested control of all matters relating to materials, colors, and patterns, issued a veto on the idea of exclusively white houses, which are a Meier signature.) Curry was pleased by the irregularly appointed sculpture gardens throughout the plan, which reminded him, he said, of "drunken British squares," but he couldn't conceal a general sense of letdown. "The thing that always disappoints me when I look at all these designs is that my vision of utopia doesn't ever include setting aside a place to park your car, for example. It's, like, utopia, you know? You should be eating ambrosia off the trees."

"Yeah, but where does the shit go?" Gonzalez said.

Curry began leafing through a magazine. It was The Next American City. As is his habit, he underlined and made notes in the margins. "Look at this," he said, stopping to point out a passage about "New Babylon," as conceived by a Dutch artist named Constant Nieuwenhuys. "It says here that utopia is … Minneapolis!"

At one point during the trip, I happened to notice a mangled single-engine Cessna in an airport hangar, and suggested that it might be fun to plant a phony plane wreck somewhere back at Playa Grande for people to discover.

"You say that as a joke," Curry replied. "But that's actually a really good idea."

Kemble was less impressed. "Someone already did that," she said. "It's called 'Fantasy Island.'"

Later in the afternoon, it became clear that Curry was seriously entertaining the idea of moving the junked plane over a hundred miles of winding mountain roads. He gestured toward a specific patch of woods and asked me what I thought of the site. Gonzalez intervened before I could answer. "You know what, Boykin?" he said. "Let me handle this one, O.K.?"

Curry and his guests had been blessed with perfect weather all week, and although it poured early in the evening, at cocktail time the rain stopped abruptly. People arrived at the clubhouse dressed in Caribbean semiformal: sandals, sundresses for the women and linen ensembles for the men. Blocks of ice spelled out "2006" beside a vast spread of caviar--nice, tropical touches--while, not far behind, an impaled pig roasted slowly, snout facing west.

Plastic champagne flutes were passed out between dessert courses. (Each chef had contributed a plate.) One of Curry's groomsmen, a journalist turned venture capitalist named Mark Colodny stood to toast the hosts; Curry, professing an aversion to being the center of attention, declined an invitation to speak himself. A bit later in the evening, as we all stood around holding our drinks, Celerie confided that the Playa Grande project had become, in effect, Boykin's second wife. "I'll give her three years," she said. "And then I'll slit her throat."

As it was getting on near eleven-thirty, the Americans, flutes in hand, boarded a bus and rode into town, past the central square, and then bore right toward the waterfront, arriving finally at a barren spit of rocks and tall grass: the future gem of Cabrera.

Mayor Cavoli, dressed in pressed jeans and a plaid shirt, was already on hand, along with his wife, who was much younger. A folding table, covered with cloth, became a bar, tended by Playa Grande employees. (There are now a hundred of them, recognizable by their bright white shirts and cheery, if sometimes bewildered, demeanors.) Streetlights, owing to a perpetually overworked electric grid, rarely shine in Cabrera, and even though the sky appeared miraculously cloud-free, it was easy, in the dim glow provided by the stars, to overlook the imposing rows of cannisters, lined up like mini-rockets, not twenty yards from where a merengue band was just setting up.

Midnight must have struck, because off in the distance sporadic white flashes were replaced by a steady strobe, punctuated by faint whistling. Curry, not knowing quite what to expect from the pyrotechnic crew he'd paid to fly in from Santo Domingo, wondered if these weren't his fireworks, exploding over the town square. Then came a sonic boom, and, as the purpose of the nearby cannisters became apparent, the ground seemed almost to shake underneath our feet.

Shock (at the decibel level) gave way to wonderment (at the expanse of each plume), perhaps followed by bemusement, and then clear alarm, as a stream of embers began falling directly upon us. But the embers flared harmlessly in the grass. More champagne.

"Note to self," Curry announced. "Next year, shoot the fireworks out over the water."

PHOTO (COLOR): Moby, Boykin Curry, Richard Meier, Celerie Kemble, and Charlie Rose want to turn a Dominican retreat into a creative Eden.

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By Ben McGrath