Eureka : 40 foot sculpture
NY
InstallationArtist
Brian Tolle
Description Show more
The massive sculpture is a brick facade of a canal house reminiscent of those that would have been found in 17th century, New York City’s Dutch colonial history. The one-ton hand-painted sculpture, is a 40-foot-high facade of a 17th-century gabled Dutch canal house.
When George Washington was inaugurated at Federal hall in 1789, the New York City that had survived the brutal seven-year British occupation was still peppered with vestiges of the homes that 17th century settlers from the Low Countries had left behind.
But those slender, gabled canal houses with their Flanders-brick facades were hardly the only legacy of 40 years of Dutch rule, from 1624-1664. What made New York unique among the American settlements was that the Dutch also instilled the values of religious freedom and free trade, well over a century before the first Congress enshrined those freedoms at Federal Hall, in what became known as the Bill of Rights.
Originally Commissioned by curator Jan Hoet for his exhibition titled “Over the Edges” in Ghent, Belgium, Tolle replaced the façade of a 17th-century Flemish canal house with a three-dimensional version of its reflection in the water below, blurring the border between architecture and its environment.
Tolle named the facade “Eureka” for the exclamation of discovery often attributed to Archimedes
The massive sculpture is a brick facade of a canal house reminiscent of those that would have been found in 17th century, New York City’s Dutch colonial history. The one-ton hand-painted sculpture, is a 40-foot-high facade of a 17th-century gabled Dutch canal house.
When George Washington was inaugurated at Federal hall in 1789, the New York City that had survived the brutal seven-year British occupation was still peppered with vestiges of the homes that 17th century settlers from the Low Countries had left behind.
But those slender, gabled canal houses with their Flanders-brick facades were hardly the only legacy of 40 years of Dutch rule, from 1624-1664. What made New York unique among the American settlements was that the Dutch also instilled the values of religious freedom and free trade, well over a century before the first Congress enshrined those freedoms at Federal Hall, in what became known as the Bill of Rights.
Originally Commissioned by curator Jan Hoet for his exhibition titled “Over the Edges” in Ghent, Belgium, Tolle replaced the façade of a 17th-century Flemish canal house with a three-dimensional version of its reflection in the water below, blurring the border between architecture and its environment.
Tolle named the facade “Eureka” for the exclamation of discovery often attributed to Archimedes
Map View
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