Word: steeled
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They opened the faucets Thursday for The New York City Waterfalls, the industrial-strength art project by Olafur Eliasson at four locations along the city's eastern waterfront (see pictures at the Looking Around blog here). Each of them consists of a steel scaffolding between 90 and 120 ft. high, about 27 to 37 meters. River water is pumped to the top and spills back down in a wide cascade that will flow daily...
...Waterfalls are almost comically thin and humble. This would be in keeping with Eliasson's general practice. Even for a project like this one, in which he's operating within (and undercutting) the Baroque tradition of massively theatrical artworks, the ordinary mechanical workings of his spectacle - the exposed steel framework, the visible spill trays at the top - are deliberately exposed to view. To borrow Frank Stella's phrase, "What you see is what you see." Which, of course, even when Stella said it, had several meanings...
This desert is all about harsh juxtapositions--flat dust interrupted by sudden mountains; a delicate flower crowning a column of cactus spines. And now a new one, man-made: the sight of a smooth, new dirt road, huffing yellow construction equipment and mile after mile of reinforced steel. This, in a place that had never before seen a project more elaborate than a shack...
Poverty makes people desperate. We got a glimpse of that when we watched a family boost their 10-year-old boy over a 12-ft fence, where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river...
...walls-that-do-the-hula end. The man on the opposite side--the serene, economical, subdued side--would have to be Japanese architect Tadao Ando. If Gehry's signature form is a whiplash, Ando's is a broad, flat plane. Gehry's best-known materials are titanium and glowing steel. Ando's is pale gray concrete...