For a brief period after its completion in 1974, the Standard Oil Building at 200 E. Randolph (now the Aon Center, previously the Amoco Building) was the tallest skyscraper in Chicago. The following year the Sears Tower was finished, claiming the crown for itself, but that June designer, sculptor, and sound artist Harry Bertoia unveiled a massive public artwork, commissioned in ’74, in the plaza of the Standard Oil Building. His “sonambient sculpture” originally sat within a 4,000-square-foot reflecting pool and consisted of 11 vertical rows of copper and brass rods ranging from four to 16 feet in height, arranged at right angles or in parallel. Because the rods are closely spaced and slightly flexible, strong winds or pushes from visitors cause them to brush together, creating a rich spatialized field of chiming, shimmering sounds.
Harry Bertoia was a jewelry artist, printmaker, and sculptor, but he remains best known for a line of chairs he designed for Knoll in 1952, many of which are still in production today. He constructed those iconic chairs from welded wire whose curves were designed to cradle the body—before working for Knoll, he’d assisted Charles Eames in bending the wood used in the older designer’s even more famous chairs. Metallic wires became a fixation for Bertoia in the late 50s, after he snapped one that he was trying to bend and it struck another. The sound it made riveted him. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institute in 1972, he explained, “If one wire produces such a sound, what would two rods produce or what would ten or a hundred.” His obsession with sound would continue unabated until he died in 1978 at age 63.
The sculpture doesn’t make a particularly broad range of sounds, but they’re very complex. “It’s basically one kind of sound,” Block says. “It’s metallic and very rich in overtones.” She dumped the recordings into her computer and analyzed them in Pro Tools, pairing some and manipulating others—a kind of analog to Bertoia’s own tape experiments. But at home, working in stereo, she could barely imagine how they’d sound on the 16 channels prepared for her at Pritzker. “It’s really hard to have a sense of what they’re going to be like,” she says. “It’s almost like the difference between an actor on camera for film and an actor onstage. The camera would be like stereo, where I’m used to picking up all the nuances there, but at Pritzker I don’t hear everything. Something way over there has to be very big, and the piece was designed for that system. Everything had to become exaggerated and longer than it would be normally.”
Block is thrilled that the new setup at Pritzker will continue to facilitate ambitious site-specific sound art, but even more so she’s happy to remind people about the Bertoia installation. “I felt like they were really important sculptures, and nobody was paying attention to them.” v
Sat 11/7, noon-6 PM; Sun 11/8, Sat 11/14, Sun 11/15, Sat 11/21, and Sun 11/22, noon-8 PM Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Michigan and Randolph Free All-ages
