In October, the college will have an exhibition of Mr. Hauben’s work from the commission, “A Sense of Place.”

He has been trying to create that feeling since he was 10 years old in his bedroom in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, in the same apartment where he lives now. He and his friend David Schwartz spent six years designing an elaborate model of Utopia, with concrete buildings, running water and futuristic design. Calling it Edge City, Mr. Hauben arranged the shapes and the colors while his friend made the concrete and paint. “It was a grand collaboration of science and art and sociology and economics,” his friend, now Professor Schwartz, said in a phone interview.

“We would have lively debates over which is better, science or art,” said Professor Schwartz, the director of the Laboratory for Molecular and Computational Genomics at the University of Wisconsin. “Looking back on it, we were just two weird kids.”

In recent e-mails, the two friends have talked about how Edge City influenced their careers. “What I’m most interested in is creating a world that invites you into it, that reflects the world in some ways, but then creates its own logic,” Mr. Hauben said.

He admitted that at times during the commission he felt constrained by outside logic. Working with a large public institution and more than a dozen entities involved in construction raised the age-old conflict between art and commerce, between patronage and independence. Mr. Hauben said he felt as if he had lost his “connection to the inspiration” while arranging bureaucratic details like insurance and installation.

Still, he said, he was thrilled with the $219,000 from the college, and the exposure, especially now as the arts are gaining momentum in the Bronx.

Until the library, he had enjoyed a “very alternative” career, with solo shows in medium-size galleries and museums in this country and in Germany. “The El,” which hangs in the Freeman Street subway stop in the Bronx, was made with fabricated stained glass and was named one of the country’s 45 best public arts commissions in 2008 by Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group.