American Art Collaborative

This sculpture is a maquette for Alexander Liberman's immense steel sculpture in the plaza of the Robert Giamo Federal Building in New Haven, Connecticut. During the 1960s and '70s, the General Services Administration's Art-in-Architecture Program commissioned many large outdoor sculptures to enrich the social and cultural environments around new federal buildings. Liberman was selected for a commission in 1978 and created this small model, along with a full-scale mock-up of the piece, before beginning work on the final sculpture. He was inspired by Bramante's Tempietto, a High Renaissance circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, and wanted to build a sculpture from elongated cylinders to create "a sense of verticality and awe.
"I have always felt that one of the great excitements of . . . monumental sculpture is just this involvement of the spectator with the . . . object. This sort of choreography . . . gives an added excitement to the work’s conception." Alexander Liberman