Is it a giant jellyfish? A spaceship? An outsized butterfly net?
Whatever it is, Brookline artist Janet Echelman’s light-as-air sculpture, which turned heads as it soared over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on Sunday morning, took a village to raise.
Arriving in the wee hours of the morning, crews closed roads to make way for the project’s six cranes. With roughly 50 workers on site, the sculpture — a vast net of rusty orange, magenta, and green hues that will float above the Greenway until October — emerged from an impossibly small wooden crate, hoisted, inch by inch and crane by crane, to span roughly half an acre in the air.
It was a colossal choreography of man and machine, as cranes lifted one portion of the net, then another, only to hand them off to workers who hand-winched them to buildings around the Greenway, fastening them tight.
But if hoisting the sculpture resembled what organizers called a “crane ballet,” its planning and design were equally intricate — a creative collaboration between Echelman, structural engineers, software developers, lighting specialists, building contractors, political officials, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, owners of nearby property, and more.
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