Shoulders is at once a question about
this relationship between natural and engineered forms,
and a love-letter to Chicago —
Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, [...]
Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.
(Sandburg)
The lamp's four faces juxtapose natural and man-made
load-bearing structures (shoulders) in the city.
One pair of faces show trees from Jackson Park's Wooded Island;
between them are trusses from the Norfolk Southern rail bridge over the Calumet River.
Jackson Park was the site of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition;
the rail bridge is adjacent to the 95th Street drawbridge,
famous from The Blues Brothers.
The similarities between the scenes are clear.
Both trees and trusses exhibit fractal patterns that
follow from shared structural requirements:
thicker load-bearing masts and the increasingly delicate branches and "twigs."
But the components of the bridge are straight and regular
with the "limbs" supported at each end,
while the trees' branches curve and fork without loops.
