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Anish
Kapoor's 'Cloud Gate' - Press Coverage |
The
Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2004 "Cloud Gate, forged of a series of highly polished stainless steel plates, is remarkable in that, even before all the seams have been burnished out, the piece transcends the beauty of its early renderings with almost hypnotic and constantly changing reflections of the urban skyline and sky." |
The
New York Times
July 18, 2004 "Performance Structures, in Oakland, CA, built and assembled the 168 steel plates and trucked them to Chicago, where workers are still polishing the welds. The piece is so large that a steel skeleton was needed inside it, but because the surface expands and contracts with the weather, the skeleton doesn't actually attach to the skin." |
The
Times London Weekend Review
July 17, 2004 "One of the world's largest outdoor installations, the sculpture has a highly polished mirror-like surface. When completed, it will appear to have been formed from liquid mercury by some giant hand. Its surface will be seamless and there will be no evidence of any means of construction. What visitors won't realize is that the sculpture is made of 168 irregularly sized stainless steel plates welded together and held in place by a complicated internal supporting grid that had to be specially developed to make the work possible-a system where gravity itself has been tricked... Enter the designer Christopher Hornzee-Jones and fabricator Ethan Silva. Chicago is subject to extreme changes in temperature between summer and winter and because Kapoor was insistent that the sculpture's surface be totally smooth and seamless, the task facing both his colleagues has been to find a way of accommodating such demanding climatic and aesthetic considerations. ... ...Silva runs Performance Structures, a structural design and build company based in Oakland, California. "Anish has the resolute determination for the look and feel of the piece," he says. "Chris is a brilliant engineer who's worked a lot with shell structures. His job was to analyze the structure and give numerical values and improve the fine tuning of the engineering," Silva's company was one of several that Kapoor approached with the challenge to produce a 2m by 3m sheet of stainless steel replicating his specification for the sculpture's skin. Of Silva, Kapoor says: "He's not one of those fabricators who tells me it can't be done." Having conceived the structure as a shell, the designers had to work out how to let it expand and contract. The solution was to create an internal network of trusses shaped to echo the eventual formation of the skin that was itself connected between two massive steel rings to allow the sculpture room to expand and contract. Like the external plates, the struts, springs, and trusses are all stainless steel. "We used weld stiffeners...on the inside and attached these to the outer skin. Each plate weighs half a ton and I suggested that we hang each of them on a spring attached to its centre of gravity. It therefore becomes weightless. By bolting it on to the next it doesn't deform under gravity," says Hornzee-Jones." |
USA
Today
July 15, 2004 "A sculpture by Indian-British artist Anish Kapoor dominates the plaza." |
The
Art Newspaper Spring
2004 "Mr. Kapoor's first public sculpture in the US is likely to become his most famous artwork, and is sure to become an icon for the 21st century Chicago. It is a huge mirrored-steel elliptical form, 66-feet long, 32-feet tall, and 47-feet wide, that will reflect the sky, the famous skyline, and anything else in its immediate vicinity. Arched upward in the middle, it enables visitors to pass under it and pause in its center to admire their warped reflections in its bulging interior dome. The phone company SBC contributed $3 million towards the piece, which is being fabricated by Performance Structures in Oakland, California. "What we're trying to do is not natural to the materials," says engineer Ethan Silva, whose team is using aerospace technology to bend 120-inch steel plates to a precise curvature, then welding them together and polishing the surface to flawless "optical" reflectivity. "To my knowledge, no one has ever made an optic this big," says, adding, "Anish is very demanding about the details," he says. "He's very particular--but we are too. We're kind of kindred spirits in that way."
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CLTV
from the Chicago Tribune
April 25, 2004 "Ethan Silva, president of Performance Structures, knew a British engineer who had done computer development work for Kapoor. Visiting London chiefly to see the '99 solar eclipse, Silva happened to look up the engineer, who spoke of the Chicago project. Silva spent years building boats, working with steel plates, three-dimensional curvatures and shell structures. Having studied physics as well as art, he became interested in the project, though he had never worked with Kapoor or any other major artist. "Anish said make a sample that's 2 meters by 3 meters and put some curvature in it," Silva said. "So I took the drawings of the sculpture and made the curvature the same as the sharpest part of the sculpture. Then I made it in four pieces that were welded together, ground and polished. It was the sample that had been requested. It weighed 700 to 800 pounds." Once this was approved by the artist, Silva was given a contract. Now he had to reconcile a number of small variations between Kapoor's drawings and model on the way toward determining precisely the shape of the piece. "Carving in foam" "Working back and forth with the artist by phone, e-mail and drawings, we endeavored to get as close as we could to what we agreed was probably what he wanted," Silva said. "Then we used a computer-controlled milling machine to carve out a piece. It was from very dense foam, not foam like your mattress, its hard like a rock almost. The first ones we did were about a foot and a half long. We carved eight or ten of them. We'd send them to him in England, and he'd look them over, making recommendations for changes. We sent about four. We worked on this for approximately six months. It was a much more arduous process than I ever believed it would be." While driving toward Kapoor's approval, Silva was evolving a computer model for the sculpture. Each time a foam piece was carved, a full computer model also was produced. The computer model was one that had to be divided into the plates-eventually there were 168-that would form the sculpture. "It's welded as a shell," Silva said, "and the shell is not that heavily loaded. Think of it structurally as an eggshell. It's thin but because its contiguous and smooth, it's strong. The shape of the plates stem from the shape of the sculpture and also from anticipating the stresses induced by welding. Every place you weld, it shrinks, so you want the shrinkages to be in sort of a rhythmic pattern around the shape to give it a nice quality.
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Chicago
Tribune Online Edition
July 15,2004 "Some hung from the fence surrounding the big bean in an attempt to get a better view. Others lined up their loved ones at just the right angle, taking pictures with the hulking silver structure glimmering in the background. At 66 feet long, 42 feet wide, and 33 feet tall, the stainless steel sculpture is, for some, a perfect match for a city that puts a premium on big things. Chicago cherishes its towering high-rises and its huge Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. 'Cloud Gate,' when completed, will be one of the largest sculptures in the world. Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor, who now lives in London, designed the elliptical shape to reflect the city's broad skyline-a huge, curved mirror facing the park and the city around it. "Look at how vivid it is," says John Horan, 49, of Chicago. "It looks like a high-definition TV. It's very cool." "I've been trying to think of how to describe it," Monahan, 57, said as she watched from behind the fence. "It's better than a mirror because it's convex. It shows Chicago. It shows the world what the city is."
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Seattle
Post Intelligencer
July 16, 2004 "A crowd gathered
Friday under the arch of the sculpture, which was dubbed "The Bean"
by visitors, to stare and wave into its spoon-like underbelly. Chicagoan Steve Skinner and his wife Louise Belmont-Skinner were awed by Cloud Gate and the joyful crowd it attracted. "I think the bean is better and more interesting than the pyramid of the Louvre in Paris," Steve Skinner said."
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Chicago
Sun-Times
July 12, 2004 "Like everybody else, I've been reading about the planned sculpture for years, but I hadn't really anticipated how sharp the reflection would be in its mirror like finish, nor could I imagine how its elliptical viewpoint would seem to capture the world around it in 3D clarity, more like gazing into a magical crystal ball than a mirror. When you see it yourself, I'll bet you'll know you're looking at something special. "The Bean" reflexively brought a smile to my face, no small feat in itself, and to the faces of nearly everyone else I saw gazing upon it in the late-morning sun." |
Public
Building Commission of Chicago-Press Release
June 29,2004 "Cloud Gate's mirrored finish is forged of a seamless series of 168 highly polished, stainless steel "plates," and its elliptical shape reflects the activity and lights of the park and the surrounding city skyline. With a 12-foot high concave area underneath, the sculpture invites visitors to visually interact with its mirror-like surface. According to Kapoor, he wanted the piece to have a classical feel yet at the same time to be very contemporary." |