Her Secret is PatienceThe art piece is shown here from the rooftop pool deck of the nearby Weston Hotel in Phoenix. It is suspended over a park and adjacent to the new light rail station in downtown Phoenix.
I've included a link to a pretty neat blog that explains a bit about this work of public art: http://www.downtownphoenix.com/blog/2010/03/her-secret-is-patience/
Fabricated from multi-colored polyester netting of a type commonly used in commercial fishing nets, the net employs nearly 64,000 meters of polyester twine and is comprised of more than 200,000 knots. Custom software was created by Buro Happold to rationalize the shape, conduct form-finding and analysis, and output drawings to manufacture. Working closely with the net fabricator, Diamond Nets, Buro Happold designed the software to account for the manual process of controlling the net looms, outputting patterning drawings that described knot counts and lengths, and splice locations.
For areas of the sculpture where net-loomed pieces could not capture the form, the nets were spliced by hand using drawings that represented every piece of twine unrolled, with each splice location dimensioned.
Material selection was key to the success of the project, both structurally and economically. In order to resist 144 kmh winds, the material had to be exceptionally strong. The Phoenix site also required consideration of the degradation of the material over time due to UV exposure. Polyester, although not UV stable, was chosen for its high strength-to-cost ratio. This enabled the city of Phoenix to purchase several versions of the same sculpture, which could changed at five-year intervals.
This is very interesting stuff, and I've always enjoyed public art, ever since we had the knitting needles installed in Concord. (They are gone now, sad to say, and I don't think I photographed them.) Gone now, but not forgotten, I guess those 91 aluminum poles were actually called Spirit Poles, here is a bit of info on them: http://cowellhistoricalsociety.org/html/spirit.html
