Below, photos of artist Anish Kapoor's Temenos, which when built will become part of the Tees Valley Giants art project at Middlesbrough in England, the "world's largest public art project."
The sculpture will fill what is currently a rather bleak landscape between Middlesbrough's Transporter bridge and the Riverside stadium and, appropriately, at 110m will be as long as a football pitch. The 50m-high steel structure consists of a pole, a circular ring and an oval ring, all held together by a kind of cat's cradle of steel wire.
Part of a regional regeneration scheme, Temenos' construction will be followed by similar structures in several nearby communities. The "why" of the project is explained by Joe Docherty, the head of Tees Valley Regeneration:
He said it was a declaration that the area had changed, that it was prepared to take risks. "This isn't something we need in the Tees valley. It's something we deserve. This is a calling card that the area is on the turn."
Kapoor, who is collaborating with structural engineer Cecil Balmond on the sculptures' designs, expands on how public art, particularly at such a massive scale, can transform perceptions of place:
"In many ways scale is a deep, mysterious and wonderful thing, and yet at some levels it gets a bad name. To reinvigorate and re-initiate scale is one of the things we're about," said Kapoor.
"There are all the arguments about public art - couldn't we have spent money on a hospital, say - and all the arguments are correct. But what happens after a while is that these things have the possibility of infiltrating people's consciousness. You can't say it's going to happen, but you can hope it does."
Watch a video about the project, here.
Further south in Sheffield, two "self-proclaimed 'post-industrial city lovers' in their mid-20s" propose the adaptive reuse of two disused cooling towers, landmarks on the city's skyline. (Below, via Flickr. More photos)
The Tinsley cooling towers - bleak, elegant, real - are often the first and last thing people see as they enter and leave the city. But soon, like Sheffield's industrial golden age, they will be consigned to history, demolished to make way for a new power station....Over the last three years, the 1940s towers have become symbolic of the battle for the city's soul - between those determined to create a 21st-century gleaming metropolis and those intent on preserving and celebrating some of the city's industrial heritage.
Tom James and Tom Keeley...have been campaigning to have the redundant 76 metre-high towers, which stand just 17 metres from the motorway, transformed into a space for public art. "The idea was to transform the cooling towers into something amazing," Keeley says. "Our Angel of the North - something that would really make people think about Sheffield differently".
But after competitions, petitions and endless meetings, after internet campaigns, the promise of public money and support of internationally acclaimed artists, the dream is finally over. E.ON, the company that owns the towers, has said they must be destroyed.
Watch a beautifully done promotional video explaining James' and Keeley's vision for the towers as "icons for the evolving city," here. Despite the apparent, tragically unhappy ending coming up for the towers, a really brilliant idea.
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