Santa Monica Cradle: Transport and Installation

The entire Cradle sculpture and the supporting form-work was transported from the place of assembly in Burbank, CA to the site in Santa Monica in one piece. The cables from each ball were connected to the 5-axis CNC routered stainless steel mounting bracket fixed to the concrete shear wall. Some of  the spheres tangent to the concrete wall were also used to further pin the structure to plates in the wall.

The sculpture was placed on a flat-bed truck using a crane and driven to the site. Two fork-lifts were used in tandem to lift the sculpture off the truck and hold it against the shear wall of the parking structure. The numbered cables attached to each of the (approximately) three hundred and fifty stainless steel balls were individually attached to the stainless steel bracket on the wall. Once this was done, the form-work and supporting aluminium truss structure were detached from the sculpture and lowered with the fork-lifts and placed back on the flat-bed truck. Brackets on the sculpture were then welded to plates on the wall to further fix the sculpture to the wall. This entire process was accomplished in less than two days.

The slide show below documents the process described above:

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