[PHOTO] "The Sphere", New York City

[rfmcdonald]

I was unaware of the statue Double Check and its World Trade Center-related history before I'd seen it in Zuccotti Park Wednesday, but I was aware of Fritz Koenig's The Sphere (Große Kugelkaryatide in its original German title, "Great Spherical Caryatid" in English translation). I just hadn't remembered it was in Battery Park, on the southernmost tip of Manhattan island.

The Sphere is a large metallic sculpture by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, currently displayed in Battery Park, New York City, that once stood in the middle of Austin J. Tobin Plaza, the area between the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. After being recovered from the rubble of the Twin Towers after the 11 September attacks, the artwork faced an uncertain fate, and it was dismantled into its components. Although it remained structurally intact, it had been visibly damaged by debris from the airliners that were crashed into the buildings and from the collapsing skyscrapers themselves.

Six months after the attacks, following a documentary film about the sculpture, it was relocated to Battery Park on a temporary basis—without any repairs—and formally rededicated with an eternal flame as a memorial to the victims of 9/11. It has become a major tourist attraction, due partly to the fact that it survived the attacks with only dents and holes.

The Sphere, as seen from one angle:



The Sphere, as seen from another angle:



The thing that attracted me most to the idea of The Sphere as it currently existed was the way it was invested in new meaning by the events of September 11th, as defined even by the original artist.

German film director Percy Adlon, who had twice previously devoted films to Koenig, made Koenigs Kugel (Koenig's Sphere) at a time when the sculpture's fate was still uncertain. In the film, the artist and the director visit Ground Zero five weeks after the attacks as the former retells the story of its creation. At first, Koenig opposed reinstalling The Sphere, considering it "a beautiful corpse."

The sculpture was eventually returned to Manhattan, and on 11 March 2002, six months to the day after the attacks, it was re-erected in Battery Park, near the Hope Garden, several blocks away from where it once stood. Koenig himself supervised the work; it took four engineers and 15 ironworkers to create a new base. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani and other local officials spoke at a ceremony rededicating it as a memorial to the victims.

"It was a sculpture, now it's a monument," Koenig said, noting how the relatively fragile metal globe had mostly survived the cataclysm. "It now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life – different from the one I gave to it."

The Sphere, as seen from yet another: