The City as Sculpture: From Skyline to Plinth, 2002

WHERE IS THE PLINTH OF THE SKYLINE?

One thing is certain. As the silhouette of the city changes, you can be sure that someone nearby has lost some sky. The impact of objects or buildings varies greatly in their significance at street level.

One can see the space under and around the Eiffel Tower and the St Louis Arch, but compare this to the Chrysler building, which is just another building within the street, defining the back edge of the pavement, or London’s Post Office tower.
Commercial buildings that add to the skyline either add to or detract from the streetscape where we encounter them physically. The piazza in front of the Rockefeller Centre is renowned for its ice rink – but how many of us have experienced the back at ground level. Can we afford to ignore this?

The Saint Louis Arch is an exceptional structure of pure catenary form, of beautiful mathematics. How did it come about? It was through an architectural competition launched in the 1930’s by the city fathers to upgrade a derelict area. Eero Saarinen’s design won. Construction began 30 years later in 1962 when funds and the site were finally cleared. It was completed more than three years later after Saarinen’s death. Saarinen set out to represent the future – and he did so through form and reflective surface – with a dynamic that linked it to our present time.

When we construct commemorative monuments or sculptures, we are very conscious of the need to construct the space around them and this space is often the most contentious element in any proposal that manifests thought and feeling, angst and joy, fear and hope.
Antony Gormley and Phillida Barlow both touched on these emotional and atavistic qualities within sculpture but making evident moral and ethical values is far more difficult, and certainly so if they are counter to the prevailing culture.
If we are up against this ‘well designed wall’, one that sees only ‘attracting the customer’, it is vitally important that non-consumer values find expression not only in sculpture, but also in architecture.

When presenting the Dublin Monument – the Millennium Spire – I was often asked: why no stair or lift so that we can see our city from the air? Several thoughts cross my mind:

a) the person remembers the fact that one could climb the steps of Nelson’s Pillar that was blown up by the IRA
b) the person has not seen the elegance of the Spire that I see, or does, and believes that this could be lost to a higher social purpose – the pleasure to the consumer who can enjoy the ride and view – for a stair or lift will destroy its proportion.

I usually suggest they visit the nearby hills that surround Dublin and see their city as a whole.

The Millennium Spire is essentially optimistic. It is like a candle that all the darkness of the world cannot extinguish. There is no traditional plinth to the Millennium Spire. It slips through a cast bronze disc flush with the ground without touching it – an expanding cone heading towards the centre of the earth where its diameter roughly equates to the area of County Dublin. The Millennium Spire ‘extends’ to infinity above celestial acupuncture – playing with light through capturing the life of the sky over Dublin and allowing it to flow to the street below and to disappear into the earth along with any rainwater from its surface. The base of the Spire itself is partially polished in order to reflect the light of street life. Its abstract polished surface is defined by a pattern created by the interference of a core of the rock, taken from the site below, that was ‘rolled’ across the double helix of DNA (a reference to the Irish diaspora, as too is the expanding spiral of the cone itself).

Out in the ‘Green city’, our designs for new pylons for Electricité de France, like grasses, also have no plinth. They too appear to come from the earth within which they are placed.
Alba di Milano has a plinth in the form of its feet that counteract the cantilever forces of the arms stretching upwards at an angle. These feet are important elements in providing seats within the plaza.