A British artist of Indian descent received a commission for this sculpture back in 2008. However, various obstacles have continually delayed the project’s realization.
The six-meter, 40-ton mirrored bean is located at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets in the Tribeca neighborhood. The 57-story luxury skyscraper, Jenga Tower, seems to lean against this sculpture. According to CNN, the creation of the stainless steel bean cost between $8 and $10 million.
The New York bean has a 100-ton “sister” – the Cloud Gate sculpture, which is considered a landmark creation by the same Anish Kapoor. This bean was installed in 2006 at Millennium Park in Chicago.
How the Half-Bean Became a Bean
In 2016, Anish Kapoor purchased an apartment for $13.5 million in the luxury skyscraper next to where his mirrored bean was born. The prestigious Jenga Tower condominium was designed by the renowned Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron for the development company Alexico Group, which commissioned Kapoor to create the bean sculpture.
However, its creation was initially stalled by the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and later by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Delays in the project’s implementation were also due to its complexity. For a long time, Tribeca residents saw the sculpture unfinished and surrounded by construction barriers, leading them to refer to it as the “half-bean.”
In 2018, the publication Tribeca Citizen released a letter to Alexico Group from Performance Structures, the company responsible for Kapoor’s works. The letter mentioned the enormous logistical and technical challenges associated with installing the Chicago bean, Cloud Gate. The authors also discussed the specifics of creating this sculpture and the Tribeca bean.
They noted that to facilitate a quicker and more cost-effective installation of the sculpture in New York, the technical team had to manufacture the bean’s fragments with maximum precision. As a result, they fit together extremely tightly, with the seams between the mirrored shell parts virtually invisible.
The letter emphasized a significant difference between the two beans. Instead of a single support frame like the Chicago sculpture, the New York bean has a separate frame for each fragment. Thanks to a complex system of cables and springs, the bean in Lower Manhattan is mobile. It can slightly change shape in response to temperature fluctuations, windy, or snowy weather.
The clients of this new art object consider one of the significant advantages of the sculpture to be its location in the heart of Tribeca – New York’s main gallery district. The mirrored bean is set to become a favorite backdrop for selfies and an attractive curiosity for art lovers and tourists alike.
Anish Kapoor (born 1954 in Bombay) is a renowned British-Indian sculptor and a member of the art group “New British Sculpture.” He is best known for his unique sculptures with reflective surfaces. His works are typically simple, monochromatic, and yet expressive. Since the late 1990s, Kapoor has created a number of large-scale works, including the 35-meter “Taratantra” (1999), installed at Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, and “Marsyas” (2002), a large steel and PVC sculpture housed in the Tate Modern gallery. In 2001, the sculpture “Sky Mirror” was installed in Nottingham, which is considered one of the artist’s iconic works. The works of this acclaimed sculptor are housed in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (USA), Fondazione Prada in Milan (Italy), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Museum De Pont in Tilburg (Netherlands), and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (Japan).