What is it?
Cyclisk is a 65-foot high (five-story), 10, 000 pound (4,535 kg), Egyptian-style obelisk made from 340 recycled bicycles. This commissioned artwork was created in 2010 by artists Mark Grieve and Ilana Specto and installed in Santa Rose, California (USA).
EPIC!!!
Mark and Illana collected unusable bicycles and cleaned them up, then welded together into a steel superstructure to create a towering obelisk form.
This project is considered to be a landmark in gateway public work.
Here is more about it…
Project background
The Santa Rosa’s City’s Art and Culture Element in the General Plan 2020 calls for creating inspiring places for the residents and visitors.
By law in Santa Rosa, any construction project costing over $500,000 must put 1% of their budget toward public art.
This has led to the creation of hundreds of benches and murals in the city, along with the Cyclisk.
The project site for Cyclisk was chosen because of its proximity to the Nissan car dealership, who funded the funded the “1% for Art” requirement.
Cyclisk is one of the largest public art projects in the region.
Once installed, it quickly gained news attention such as Wired’s Gadget Labs and Inhabitat won a number of awards, like AIA Decade of Design First Place Award, a Structural Engineers (SEAONC) award, and the prestigious Public Art Network Year in Review Award.
Materials & Budget
The project budget was $37,000 and included expenses related to design development, engineering, collecting and disassembling bike parts from nonprofit bike bicycle groups, insurance, fabrication, special inspections, transportation, installation of the artwork, and all other project-related expenses.
All work was completed by artists and Grieve and Spector who chose not to take an artist fee in order to create the necessary scale required for such a work.
Architect Daniel Strening and ZFA Engineering also donated time to make the project happen.
Bicycles were collected from the debris bins of the following bicycle kitchens: Trips for Kids/Recyclery in San Rafael, Bici Centro in Santa Barbara, and Community Bikes in Santa Rosa, as well as individual donors who formed integral partnerships.
Every bicycle (and the monument’s one tricycle) were beyond the point of riding.
Besides bicycle parts, the monument was sprayed with a treatment to help preserve its color and integrity.
The towering traditional Egyptian-style obelisk made of reclaimed bicycle parts brings a sense of whimsy and regal ridiculousness to a previously downtrodden section of the City of Santa Rosa.
It also shows you can shape a landfill-bound material into a polished form.
According to the artists: Cyclisk creates a series of intersecting rhythms – a visual metaphor for the human experience exploring technology and the humanities – history and possible futures – individual as well as collective for the City of Santa Rosa landmark, evoking a “world of possibilities,” for years to come.
Some content for this post sourced from CODAworx, Atlas Obscura and Santa Rose City.