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Trafalgar square sculpture to be unveiled
By Katharine Barney 02.10.07
Reflective: the Trafalgar Square sculpture
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The sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is to be unveiled next month, seven months behind schedule.
The coloured glass sculpture, Model For A Hotel 2007, by Thomas Schütte, will be erected on 7 November, replacing Marc Quinn's marble statue Alison Lapper Pregnant. The new sculpture was meant to be put up in April but the firm working on the project went bust.
Mayor Ken Livingstone was forced to allocate extra public money - believed to be £153,000. The project, originally named Hotel For The Birds, is an architectural model of a 21-storey building, which will collect and reflect the light.
Schütte, 53, hopes the artwork will poke fun at "obscene" architects who seek to dominate public spaces with faceless, imposing designs and will also provide a home for the few pigeons that have survived the Mayor's Trafalgar Square birdfeeding ban.
The work was chosen by a panel of experts in 2004 after a major consultation about the fourth plinth, regarded as Britain's most significant public art space.
Reader views (4)
I would like to have been on this panel, then we may have got a real bit of art work!
- Katcher Bancroft, London, England
If it's for the birds, I might vote for it!
- Carlyle Braden, Croydon, UK
This is awful. It will only look worse as it inevitably gets dirtier.
A 3-G aerial would surely be more appopriate for London, maybe in chrome, as then it would be 'art'.
So sad that it's always so easy to tell when a commitee has made a decision on something, rather than an individual.
- Gary, Hackney, London
Can it possibly turn out as bad as it looks?
- Stephen, London
