The San Francisco skyline has radically changed over the past two decades because of all the real estate development. It’s changing again now, but subtly, because of an artwork. The Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, famous for his slyly deceptive photography, has just planted a slender, 69-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture on a hilltop in Yerba Buena Island, meant to serve as an anchor — or beacon, given its height — for the area’s new public art program.
From some viewpoints it looks like the tip of a sewing needle poking out above the trees and cellular towers of this island in the San Francisco Bay. From others it seems an elegant high-tech cousin of the Transamerica Pyramid, the chunkier building across the bay. Because of its particular curved geometry, which tapers from a concrete base of 23 feet to a top that is less than one inch in diameter, the sculpture looks as if it’s growing infinitely smaller and taller as it reaches for Earth’s outer atmosphere.
Read more at the New York Times.