Citibank Atrium Sculpture Construction

"EARTHSHADE"
Sculpture Commission- Citigroup Atrium, No.1 North Wall Quay, Dublin ; Seán Hillen, December 2003

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This is a commission for the atrium of the Citigroup building, near the IFSC, in Dublin. It arose from an accidental meeting with John Brophy of their Corporate Realty Services organisation. John happened to be visiting the Firestation Artists' Studios, where I was a resident, and I happened to show him some of the theatre props and special effects work I was doing. He explained that there was a bit of a problem in that their amazing atrium window, about 50 ft. wide and five storeys high, though tinted looks south over the river and a very low horizon, and the glare from the low sun can be intense. They had looked at the problem before and the solution was clearly some kind of moveable shade object, but what would it look like and be made of? After some despair and a great deal of thought I eventually hit on the idea of using an image of the earth itself as the shade. The idea was also that it would look perfectly like a suspended globe, but be paradoxically thin.	above; outside view of the Citigroup building
I was originally hoping to produce a stained-glass-window effect, and to perhaps produce a pool of cool light in the shade. In the event we decided to make the object double sided with a different view on each face, and the fabric had to be diffusing rather than clear. The final object has a diameter of 10 and a half feet, but is only 100 millimetres thick. It has a framework of rolled steel and the images printed on fabric stretched on both sides. There is a trim of stainless steel around the outside. I assembled the finished thing in the atrium, with help from CRS staff, over a long weekend. Several novel techniques had to be devised to execute it. I found Dave Harris who does custom designed hoist systems for theatre and art galleries, and he devised a very elegant suspension system with radio remote control, and the main steel ring was made by Mark McCaffrey of Impact Creative Design. The images are 'painted up' opposite sides of a trompe-l'oeil shaded sphere of the Earth, extracted from data from NASA's Earth Observatory 'Blue Marble' project	above, left : an early photoshopped impression above, right : the finished sculpture below, right ; the finished sculpture