Just across the bridge in Long Island City, Ted Lawson of the small, well-regarded Prototype New York, takes a more modest approach, reflecting a modern paradox: As large-scale art fabricators have struggled, some boutique-size operations with what might be called a handmade ethos have flourished. Prototype New York fabricates perhaps a dozen commissions a year, and takes on few new clients — but most are deep-pocketed ones, including Mariko Mori, Ghada Amer and Yoko Ono.

Now 47, Lawson began his career as an assistant in the mid-1990s to Koons, whose teeming factory of helpers (their ranks have at times swelled to some 120 people) came to symbolize the mainstreaming of manufactured art, producing intricate paintings made by over a dozen workers through a color-by-numbers system. While fabricating serves as a buffer to keep the lights on and production consistent, Lawson considers himself “first and foremost” an artist; his interdisciplinary work ranges from highly realistic figures cast in silicone to painted abstraction. Tables on the main floor of his 5,000-square-foot studio display a series of molds for plaster versions of the 150 crumpled red Solo cups that were part of a piece that Paula Crown showed last year at London’s 10 Hanover gallery.

To Lawson, fabricating is a bit like producing a record; you are trying to enhance the artist’s vision, which is sometimes meticulously conceived and other times inchoate. Every work has three components, he says — concept, material and process — and at times he helps with each of them. For Crown’s Solo cups, for example, which were inspired by her seeing scads of them discarded on the floor after a party, they discussed whether the cups should be made from soft or hard material, if they should be all the same shape or if there should be one giant one, in stainless steel, like Anish Kapoor’s famous reflective “bean” in Chicago (itself fabricated by a team of about 70 from Performance Structures Inc. in Oakland, Calif., and MTH Industries in Illinois).

With each artist — Lawson only works with a few at a time — he develops a unique process. For her “Wave U.F.O.” series from the 2000s, Mori, an artist known for her intricate sci-fi installations, began with 3D renderings from which Lawson made foam models; Mori then drew on them with pencil in his studio. Together, they rendered them in plaster and, finally, acrylic. “At a certain point, we got so in tune we barely had to talk,” he says. With Ono, who is “all concept,” he was given only cursory instructions and three weeks to make a 2003 piece: 100 cast body parts to be heaped on the floor like garbage — arms, legs, torsos. The only time he met her was at the opening. “She asked, ‘How did you enjoy making the piece?’” he says.