An awesome spectacle awaits visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cantor Roof Garden, which opens for the season on Tuesday: a gnarly thicket of trees and branches extending 130 feet from one end of the open-air deck to the other and rising 29 feet overhead. It looks as if a tornado had ripped through Central Park and deposited its gleanings here. Except the thicket is made of shiny metal rods and pipe: some 10,000 pieces weighing more than seven tons and ranging from three-eighths of an inch to 10 inches in diameter, with larger trunk sections made of rolled plate.

It’s as though all that wood had been transformed by a Midas