Spinning Chandelier to activate urban space under Granville Street Bridge
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:04:11 +0000
A massive chandelier that spins twice-a-day is expected to animate an underused urban space beneath the Granville Street Bridge.
When fully operational, Spinning Chandelier, by Rodney Graham, will light up, drop to its lowest point, start rotating for four minutes, slow down and stop, before rising back under the bridge.
The tentative times when it will go through its cycle are at noon and 9 p.m. daily.
The public is invited to the unveiling of Spinning Chandelier on Nov. 27 at 6:30 p.m. It’s located directly under the bridge at Beach Avenue.
The chandelier is the public-art component of Vancouver House, the distinctive 60-storey condo tower designed by Bjarke Ingels.
Reid Shier, public-art consultant for the project, said the level of complexity in its design and installation makes Spinning Chandelier unlike any other public artwork.
“It’s extraordinary,” he said. “The scale, the complexity, the level of detail and the engineering makes it completely unique. This has never been done before. It’s very complicated.”
The 18th-century-style chandelier weighs more than 3,400 kilograms and measures 7.8-by-4.3 metres. Spinning Chandelier is comprised of stainless steel, LED lights and 600 polyurethane crystals. It was made by Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state.
“It’s difficult to put a piece of public art in dialogue with Bjarke Ingels architecture — it’s already a giant sculpture,” Shier said. “In thinking about that, Rodney was looking at the space under the bridge as an extraordinary volume with a very grand presence.”
When the project was first proposed, the budget was $1.2 million, which represented the amount Westbank Corp. had to spend on public art when a building more than 100,000 square feet is rezoned. But after taking into account the amount of design and complexity of the fabrication during the past three years, the cost increased to $4.8 million.
Shier singled out the City of Vancouver for supporting such an unusual project.
“There are not many cities I think that would allow a giant spinning chandelier to come off one of their pieces of infrastructure,” he said.
Eric Fredericksen, head of public art for the city, said that while Spinning Chandelier is a private initiative by Westbank, the city has been working to support the public-art project, especially since it’s hanging from the city-owned Granville Bridge.
For Spinning Chandelier, Westbank was allowed to pool its public-art requirement for Vancouver House and three other developments, including The Butterfly, the tower at Nelson and Burrard streets by the late Bing Thom.
“It made sense to think creatively about where resources are generated versus where can they be deployed effectively,” he said.
While Spinning Chandelier is a stand-alone public artwork designed for a specific site, it’s inspired by one of Graham’s earlier works, a 35 millimetre film of a spinning crystal chandelier called Torqued Chandelier Release. That work in turn was inspired by an experiment by scientist Isaac Newton that involved half-filling a bucket with water, suspending it from a coiled rope and then allowing it to unwind. Newton believed the experiment established the idea of absolute space.
One writer described Graham’s 35 mm film as a “dizzying, glamorous spectacle” that makes a historical and intellectual point.
“The luminosity of the chandelier also takes on a richer meaning when related back to Newton’s status as a central thinker during the Age of Enlightenment,” Christina Bagatavicius writes. “ … the chandelier takes on the dual role of recreating a historical experiment as well as cleverly personifying the illumination of the mind through thought.”