This series is all about one piece of art in San Francisco. Charles O. Perry sculpted this piece, titled "Eclipse," for the Hyatt Regency at Embarcadero in San Francisco in 1973. Here's Mr. Perry's biography from his website, www.charlesperry.com: "Charles O. Perry is a creator an artist of many dimensions who ponders the wonderful mysteries of the universe. His large scale and monumental sculptures celebrate and question the laws of nature. It is his intuitive investigation of nature's variables that provides the springboard for many of Perry's concepts. Believing that sculpture must stand on its own merit without need of explanation, Perry's work has an elegance of form that masks the mathematical and scientific complexity of its genesis. Perry has always extolled the beauties of nature and the nature of materials. Beginning with watercolors of his native Montana, inventing equipment to improve his tour of duty in Korea, celebrating Japanese reverence for natural materials in architecture and returning to America to study art and architecture at Yale University in 1954, he has embraced the "what if's". While Perry was at Yale it was the Chairman of the Art School, Joseph Albers, who encouraged Perry to play with materials and to "discover their true nature". As a student, Perry invented a complex building brick that needed no mortar and was unrestricted by the limits of size. This mathematically based form was the result of wonder whether the rhombus shape could be changed to become something else. The concept was intuitive, the result was visual art. The piece was later shown at Spoleto's Festival, 1969, in Spoleto, Italy. After graduating from Yale, Perry practiced architecture from 1958-1963 in San Francisco, California with the firm of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. During his architectural career he had developed many sculptural models and was offered a one-man sculpture show in San Francisco. At the same time, he won the Prix de Rome, a prestigious award granted by the American Academy in Rome for two years study in Italy. Prior to leaving for Rome in 1964, he had secured two major sculpture commissions. "The basic difference in the discipline of architecture and sculpture is that I can't force a solution in sculpture, where in architecture, one can arrive at an apparent 'rational' solution through continual work." For Perry, the appropriateness of the form is the final goal or criteria. Since 1964, Perry has concentrated on large scale public sculpture, the most prestigious of which stands in front of the National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C. The piece, "Continuum", began as an exploration of the Mobius strip, a product of pure mathematics formed by joining two ends of a strip of paper after giving one end a 180 degree twist, thus creating only one edge. The center of the bronze sculpture symbolizes a black hole, while the edge shows the flow of matter through the center from positive to negative space and back again in a continuum. "When I set off to be an artist, I would avoid the arbitrary, esteem the orders of God in Nature, make things that were beautiful, try to make things that appeared to have no author, things you thought you had seen before; entwined with mathematics, geometry, topography, spinning, interlocking, always saying thank you God." Perry's sculptures are located in public spaces at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Harvard University, Boston, MA; University of Connecticut at Storrs, CT; Zeimu University Tokyo Japan; Indianan University Museum of Art, Bloomington, IND; General Electric headquarters, Fairfield, CT; IBM Headquarters, Charlotte, NC; Shell Oil, Melbourne, Australia and Singapore. There are about ninety major commissions throughout the world. As an industrial designer, Perry had invented three unique IBD prize winning chairs. His patents on chair design are licensed to Krueger International, Virco, and Steelcase. On occasion, Perry designs other objects of art such as a collection of jewelry and silver for Tiffany, NY and puzzles sold through the Museum of Modern Art. A chess set composed of two tubes that when taken apart contain all the game pieces is in the Design Collection of MoMA. In recent years, Perry has lectured on mathematics and art in conferences throughout the world. " SF0704-45007-HyattRegency