City Fragment

Lead Pencil Studio

Troy Block

As an homage to the past, thousands of steel rods hover ghost-like, ever changing with the weather and light.

Located in the courtyard at the top of the Boren hill climb on South Lake Union’s Troy Block, this sculpture hovers like a delicate pencil drawing, infinitely mutable and almost ghost-like. Made of thousands of small, blackened stainless steel rods, it changes dramatically depending on the weather and time of day. From the base of the sculpture, integrated LEDs sweep the surface of the steel, rendering it white.

City Fragment was inspired by the tall, narrow shape of the Troy Block courtyard as well as by artists Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo’s ongoing interest in small-scale, informal architecture that develops organically in commercial districts—such as newspaper stands, kiosks, transit stops, comfort stations, and parking attendant huts. The artists see these structures as “icons for a transformed neighborhood.”

South Lake Union has undergone tremendous change over the last decade. Now the neighborhood’s once-prevalent empty land is but a memory—or an abstraction for those who have moved to Seattle more recently. In creating this work, Lead Pencil Studio intended for the thousands of new professionals who pass through this area daily to “pause to reflect on the sculptural form and connect it to the history of the neighborhood.”

About the Location

Troy Block

For nearly a century, Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood was sparsely dotted in low-slung industrial and commercial buildings. In recent years the area has rapidly transformed into a densely packed hub of social science and high-tech office towers peppered with mixed-use housing and retail. The Troy Block—a full city block on a steep slope with…

Read more about the art and artists at Troy Block. More >