Features

Rejected in San Francisco, then spurned in Berkeley, Spaceship Earth is headed south. 

“It’s about time it found a landing place,” its creator, Finno-American sculptor Eino, said Monday. 

The sculpture, a 350,000-pound blue Brazilian quartzite sphere studded with bronze islands and continents, will be installed at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. 

In San Francisco, public arts officials rejected the orb as too big and unfitting for its honoree—renowned environmentalist David Brower. Berkeley then considered finding a home for it, while the sculpture itself, never assembled, languished in a warehouse at the Presidio. 

As a friend of both the Berkeley-born David Brower and Brian Maxwell, the late PowerBar founder who commissioned the work, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates embraced the idea of placing the sculpture in Berkeley. He asked the Civic Arts Commission (CAC) to find it a home. 

The first hints of trouble came at the CAC, where then-Commissioner Bonnie Hughes made clear her bemusement with the rush to adopt what she considered an aesthetically dubious creation. 

Hughes, who opposed the controversial piece on aesthetic grounds, expressed her frustration in one sentence when describing the meeting last year when all but two of her fellow commissioners voted to accept the statue: “How would you like to have a 350,000-pound political football tossed in your lap?” 

Eino used virtually the same words Monday. “It’s a 356,000-pound football politicians are kicking around,” he said, “and its honoring a great man.” 

Some folks still didn’t seem to take to the thing, and while the CAC searched for possible sites, each selection in turn met with rejection. UC Berkeley didn’t want the thing, and neither did neighbors of city parks selected as possible sites. The East Bay Regional Parks District nixed any sites in Tilden Park as inappropriate. 

The Parks and Recreation Commission turned thumbs down on a proposal to locate the sculpture in Ohlone Park on July 25. Other rejected possibilities were Aquatic Park and the Berkeley Marina. 

Eino and Brower’s family objected to the Aquatic Park site because speeding traffic did not seem the most appropriate honor to the environmentalist. 

“One of (David Brower’s) requirements was that the sculpture not be placed next to traffic. I told the mayor, but I don’t think he heard me,” said Eino. “I was also concerned about placing it on landfill and in an area with no security.” 

CAC Vice Chair David Snippen agreed. “It seems rather inappropriate to install a sculpture dedicated to an environmentalist on top of a landfill,” he observed. 

By the time it was over, the CAC’s Public Arts Committee had considered more than 30 sites. 

With the final acceptable Berkeley site off the table, Eino remembered his visit two-and-a-half years ago to Kennesaw State University, located 20 miles north of Atlanta, Ga., where he said his works had been enthusiastically received. 

College officials there had no qualms about perching a statue of Brower atop the sculpture, an element that Berkeley had considered removing, thus restoring the work to the sculptor’s original intent—a design Brower himself had approved. 

Eino said the decision on a new location had been left up to him. “I went to the school two years ago to lecture, and they were really excited when I showed them slides” of the work in progress, he said. 

“They have a very good ecology program, and the students really want to honor David Brower properly,” Eino said. “They have a perfect location, with a forest behind and looking down over the campus. 

If all goes well, Spaceship Earth will be unveiled at its new and permanent home on Earth Day 2006.  

So Berkeley will just have to be content with a far larger monument, the five-story David Brower Center planned for construction at the corner of Oxford Street and Allston Way. 

Mayor Tom Bates said Monday that he was sad to see the sculpture go. 

“We just couldn’t find a place for it here in Berkeley,” he said. “It was a large globe, and hard to place. It’s too bad, but the Maxwell family felt it wasn’t welcome here. It’s unfortunate, but we have to move on.”