Gaby
A British artist of Indian descent was commissioned to make this sculpture in 2008, but a series of obstacles repeatedly delayed the project.
The six-meter, 40-ton mirrored bean sits at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets in Tribeca. The 57-story luxury skyscraper known as the Jenga Tower seems to lean over the sculpture. According to CNN, creating the stainless-steel bean cost between $8 million and $10 million.
The New York bean has a 100-ton “sister” — the Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, also by Anish Kapoor. Cloud Gate was installed in Millennium Park in 2006.
How the Half-Bean Became a Bean
In 2016, Anish Kapoor bought a $13.5 million apartment in the luxury skyscraper next to the site where his mirrored bean would be installed. The Jenga Tower condominium was designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron for the developer Alexico Group, which commissioned Kapoor to create the sculpture.
But the project was initially stalled by the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and was later delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Delays were also caused by the sculpture’s technical complexity. For a long time, Tribeca residents saw the work unfinished and surrounded by construction barriers, and they dubbed it the “half-bean.”
In 2018, the publication Tribeca Citizen published a letter from Performance Structures to Alexico Group. Performance Structures was the company responsible for work on Kapoor’s pieces. The letter outlined the enormous logistical and technical challenges associated with installing the Chicago bean, Cloud Gate, and discussed the specifics of creating the Tribeca bean.
The letter said that to make installation in New York quicker and more cost-effective, the technical team had to manufacture the bean’s fragments with extreme precision. As a result, the pieces fit together so tightly that the seams in the mirrored shell are virtually invisible.
The letter also highlighted a major 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 can move slightly. It changes shape in response to temperature shifts, wind, or snow.
The sculpture’s backers see one major advantage as its location in the heart of Tribeca — New York’s main gallery district. The mirrored bean is expected to become a popular backdrop for selfies and a draw for art lovers and tourists alike.
Anish Kapoor (born 1954 in Bombay) is a British-Indian sculptor and a member of the “New British Sculpture” movement. He is best known for works with reflective surfaces. His pieces are typically simple and monochromatic, yet expressive. Since the late 1990s, Kapoor has produced several large-scale works, including the 35-meter Taratantra (1999), installed at the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, and Marsyas (2002), a large steel-and-PVC installation at the Tate Modern. In 2001, Sky Mirror was installed in Nottingham and is considered one of his iconic works. Kapoor’s sculptures are held in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Museum De Pont in Tilburg, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa.
