Batcolumn, 1977
Claes Oldenburg
Plaza of Harold
Washington Social Security Administration Building
600 West Madison Street
In 1965, Pop
artist Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) began making drawings for colossal monuments
consisting of everyday objects enlarged to gargantuan proportions. Some of his
proposals included a giant electric fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, a
pair of giant scissors to replace the Washington Monument, a Good Humor ice
cream bar for Park Avenue, New York, and a railroad station in the form of a
wristwatch for Florence, Italy. Many, of course, remain unrealized but Chicago
is home to one structure that made it off of the paper: Batcolumn.
Commissioned by the U. S. General Services
Administration’s Art-in-Architecture program, the metal latticework piece
generated a great deal of disapproval in the press, with one citizen
complaining that the artist “ripped off the taxpayers for a $100,000 baseball
bat.” For the project, Oldenburg sought an appropriate symbol for the city and
one that would make formal references to the surrounding environment. When a
nearby chimney reminded him of a baseball bat, he took the outline and soon
decided to open the surface in order to relieve the solid mass and echo the
cross-bracing of Chicago’s many steel bridges.
The realized structure is nearly 100 feet tall, formed
from a network of 24 vertical and 1608 connecting struts of Cor-Ten steel and
aluminum painted with gray enamel.
Placed atop a four-foot high, ten-foot diameter pedestal, Oldenburg’s monument
may be read as a paean to baseball, a tribute to the steel industry, or simply
an irreverent poke at our expectation that a monument necessarily be
“heroic.”
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