Henry Moore's Warning
“I tell my eyes look the other way
But they don’t seem to hear a word I say
And I, go to pieces and I want to hide”
On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi established the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction under the Stage Field Stadium located on the University of Chicago's Hyde Park campus. The laboratory was a squash court, which is an appropriate given the speed and force that a squash ball ricochets off the walls of a court.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the experiment, sculptor Henry Moore created Nuclear Energy, which was unveiled at 3:36PM on December 2, 1967, which reflects the precise time of success. It should not be surprising that Moore fashioned the sculpture as a an amalgamation of human head and a mushroom cloud. The bottom portion of the statue is mimic the a church cathedral's architecture. The contrast between the sculpture's bronze heavy surface is particularly striking when viewed with the Max Palevsky West dormitory as a backdrop. It always looked appropriate when the backdrop was the Regenstein Library, with its Brutalistic style, but the library's concrete surface did not provide sufficient visual contrast.
