Calder worked with a wide range of SOM architects and designers—including Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham and Davis Allen—all of whom described him as a generous and engaging man. For the Fourth Financial Bank in Kansas City, Calder designed a series of maquettes in preparation for a large-scale mobile to be suspended within a glass atrium. “Typical of Calder,” remembered Bruce Graham, “he generously donated these five-by-six-inch maquettes to the university, giving them an invaluable collection for their museum.” ²

Among Calder’s last projects was an installation in the lobby of the world’s tallest building at the time, the Sears Tower. Universe depicts the “big bang” of creation through a series of kinetic steel sculptures that spin in perpetual motion. Unveiled in 1974, the artwork embodies Calder’s aesthetic philosophy as he described it over forty years earlier, in a 1932 edition of the journal Abstraction-Creation: “How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.” ³

(2) Betty J. Blum, “Oral History of Bruce Graham,” Chicago Architects Oral History Project, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1997-98.

(3) Alexander Calder, How can art be realized? from Abstraction-Creation, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932.