Metronome
Union Square South, New York City
The Related Companies with participation of
The Public Art Fund and The Municipal Art Society

Central panel: 98 x 50 feet (29.8 x 15.2 m.)
Overall: 98 x 200 feet (29.8 x 60.9 m.)

Brick, Steel, Aluminum, Bronze, L.E.D. Numeric Display, Steam, Incandescent light, Gold.

Introduction
Metronome is an investigation into the nature of time. The work references the multiple measures of time that simultaneously inform and confound our consciousness of the moment. The composite work intends to evoke contemplation on the dynamic flux of the city. The elements suggest the instant and infinity, astronomical sequence, geological epoch and ephemerality. Metronome is meant to be integral to the very history, architectural fabric, spirit and vitality of the city.

The Elements
The elements that compose Metronome refer to and are very much a part of the place where the work exists: Union Square in the City of New York.

The central element is a brick wall built in concentric circles, creating a wave pattern like ripples on still water after a stone is cast into it, making the wall seem to undulate. Gold leaf accentuates the center of the work, a dark aperture that emanates a constant halo of steam. At noon and midnight the hole erupts with a huge plume of steam that is accompanied by an explosion of sound composed to mark the exact instant and its passage, like a noonday whistle or a public clock that marks the time.

Counterpoised below on the wall is a massive piece of bedrock, displaying the millennia of geological history. A long thin bronze cone is poised at a diagonal on the rippling brick façade: a time indicator that suggests perspective.

A large bronze hand poised high on the wall is an accurate enlargement taken from the historical statue of George Washington in Union Square Park directly below.

The Context
Metronome considers the built environment, infrastructure and architecture which envelops us and challenges our relationship to it.

The city in which we exist is in constant flux, a place built and destroyed, yet often buildings and especially their street façades are conceived with august seriousness, projecting an image of stability and permanence. The architecture of the city appears to be made to deceive time and resist fate. Metronome confronts this fiction.

The walls that define the city are defied by this work, which celebrates the optimism and infinity of the dramatic perspectives of the city streets. Building façades are often monuments to transitory aspirations, often quickly forgotten.

The façade in the city of today is a farce. Thin, brittle, a skin easily ruptured. If architecture is the echo of human desire, then it resounds with
the fear of transformation.
.

The brick architecture of the city is a testament to human will. Laid meticulously, each brick is placed with a singular, ephemeral motion, these increments of labor crescendo into the mass which constitute so much of New York's urban structure. Brick, the most common of building material is often taken for granted. Seldom are brick walls glorified, seldom are they questioned.

The Vortex
The Vortex, the brick façade of Metronome, is both a celebration of the wall in the city and a critique of architecture in general. Using the very same brick which forms most of the remainder of the building, the Vortex undulates in a circular wave pattern, such as ripples created on the surface of still water after a stone is cast. The bricks are placed in a standard running bond, yet laid concentrically, defying gravity , radiating dynamic flux as they diminish across the vertical plane. The Vortex becomes an icon of the extraordinary human endeavor which creates the city, always in transformation, built incrementally piece by piece. This wall implies that nothing is fixed nor known nor can be relied on to be a monument for long.

The Source
The Source is a crescendo of almost pure gold overlaid on the brick. Created of an indelible material, The Source is an intermediate foil between the ephemerality the steam and the physicality of the brick. Simultaneously expanding and condensing, the gold suggests a gravitational field as well as an explosion releasing shards of energy: a moment caught.

The Infinity
At the epicenter is The Infinity, a dark void, an enigmatic hole in the building, the focal point of the entire work. It is the mouth, eye and heart. Metronome begins and ends here. When viewed from a distance uptown, The Infinity is the optimistic point to which the eye is drawn by the dramatic perspective of Park Avenue. The Infinity is both absence and eternity.

The Steam
A plume of pure white ephemeral steam escapes from the aperture. Formless, constantly changing, this corona of vapor is symbolic of the internal energy of the city and ultimately of the earth. Reminiscent of the steam vents in the streets below as well as natural geothermal fumaroles, the steam is infused with the sense of something unknowable, untouchable as time is itself.

There is a tension, a sense of latent power, an expectation of potential. A sense of suspense and anticipation builds with the passing hours, like waiting for Old Faithful geyser. As the instant of noon and midnight approach, the impossible sense of attempting to grasp a particular moment becomes more and more acute. Anticipation of the hour at the Horologe of Prague or the cannons of Rome's Gianicolo or Edinburgh Castle precipitates the excitement that something is going to happen, we know it, we all know it, but still the tension is there.

The Passage
The numerals of The Passage glow from within the glass skin of the curtain wall on the left side of the façade. The fifteen numerals attempt to grasp the present tense, indicating with atomic precision the time since midnight and the time remaining, in hours, minutes and seconds until the midnight to come. The digits read 240000000000000 at midnight and 120000000000012 at noon, counting up on the left and down on the right, clocking the sum and balance of the day. The center three digits count fractions of seconds with the energy, the exhilaration and ultimate flux that is the essence of New York City - the vanishing, dissipating intangibility of time, the speed and the frenzy, the fragmentation and multiplicity. The sequence of numerals, intensify towards the center, echoing the undulating brick of The Vortex.

The Sounds
As each hour approaches, the center digits count down the seconds.

A composition of sounds punctuate the fleeting moment of each hour. In synchrony with a single plume of steam, like the inhale and exhale of a breath, the sound impacts and decays, dissolving with the steam.

The Focus
The long thin bronze taper, aligned with the perspective of the street, draws one's eye up to the hole in the fluid brick wall. The taper not only accentuates the diminishing perspective, but also suggests a second hand or a musical instrument, the possible source of the sound.

Noon and Midnight
At the moment of expectation a huge burst of steam issues forth, a great intangible explosion, an eruption of voluminous nothingness, as the moment passes before we can quite comprehend it. Filling the façade, the cloud and the sound announce the momentous occurrence and instantaneously become an echo from the past and disperse. Then time continues on. The steam becomes again a gentle plume, breathing with light, growing and diminishing.

The Matter
The scale of time is often difficult to fathom beyond the duration of our short lives. To question the brevity in which we live relative to the time eclipsed in the formation of the earth is to better appreciate and comprehend what is before us in the present. The Matter is a large symbolic rock mass counterpoised to the steam above, emerging from beneath the undulating brick surface of the Vortex, dynamically thrusting through the façade. The architecture appears to have been constructed around this immobile promontory. The Matter is suggestive of geological time, of the substance of planets, and of the earth. Massive and peculiar, it is a reminder of the geology our island is built on, Gray Manhattan shist cantilevered up and positioned like an apparition, a relic of another eon.

This, the only large equestrian bronze to survive from antiquity, only survived from being melted down because it was mistakenly long thought to be Constantine, the first Christian emperor. The substance of history as well as monuments and what they portray always shift according to the observer. For the public viewing Metronome, the hand can ultimately only be seen in the observer's own moment.

The Beacons
When day turns to night, The Beacons scan the crests of the brick waves, three focused beams highlighting the curvilinear surface of The Vortex. Briefly, like from lighthouses on the sea, a transitory glow falls upon the elements on the wall.

The Phases
Critical to our perception of time is the entire syntax of the heavens above and beyond. The Phases complete the scenario of Metronome. Symbolic of astronomical time, this lunar sphere is synchronized with the movement of the moon relative to the earth. The sphere, half gold and half black, gradually revolves within its shadow in a dark hemispherical cavity. The gilt surface suggests the light of the sun on the moon and when the moon is full in the lunar month only gold will show. This celestial element serves as a contrast to the instantaneous, dissolving steam well as a ballast to the rapidly dissolving electronic 24 hour day.

Epilogue
New York City pulses with enormous energy. There is an ever-present sense that an underlying source makes the city a hot spot, active with desire, intellect, pathos. Certain places on earth are geothermally active; Manhattan's streets release vaporous plumes from a plethora of fumaroles. The ephemerality of this steam in the streets suggests the volatility of the place. Metronome poses as a vent for this energy - an oracular center for the public to gauge their momentary presence, their mortality, from which the city can be examined as a vital infrastructure.

Viewers are confronted and reassured, confused, enlightened and asked to question the moment of their existence in relation to their natural and built environment.

Ultimately, the work is an ode to mortality and the impossibility of knowing time