A one-ton fiber art sculpture that flutters nearly 400 feet above the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway reflects the behind-the-scenes involvement of local architectural and engineering firms that played key roles in its design.
Brookline artist Janet Echelman’s first East Coast public art installation used software from Waltham-based AutoDesk and documentation tools written by Cambridge-based Arup, the lead engineering designer.
Using custom software, Arup created the geometric design for the half-acre sculpture, which contains over 500,000 knots and 100 miles of polyester twine connecting it to 125 High St., International Place and the Intercontinental Hotel.
Designs reflected the technical challenges of Echelman’s highest sculpture to date, which can exert over 100 tons of force and is built to withstand winds of up to 110 mph. Arup engineers developed software analyzing the wind load and tested the findings at SINTEF, a Norwegian research organization.
“Our first task was to identify buildings with sufficient reserve capacity to resist the many tens of thousands of pounds of force the sculpture will exert in this particularly windy urban corridor of Boston,” Patrick McCafferty, associate principal in Arup’s Cambridge office, said in a statement. “The building capacities and their geometric constraints directly influenced the form, density and overall composition of the piece. As such, the sculpture can be viewed as the physical manifestation of the potential energy embodied within the Greenway itself.”
Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction provided cranes used Sunday to elevate the sculpture above the Greenway park and coordinated the job site logistics, including working around I-93 off-ramps and a Boston fire station.
The Boston installation is Arup’s fourth collaboration with Studio Echelman, following earlier exhibits at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters in Seattle, a temporary exhibit in Santa Monica, Calif. and an interactive sculpture at TED2014 in Vancouver. Another will be unveiled later this year in Philadelphia.
