The Conquest of Space

Monument and contrails, originally uploaded by lectureral.

I created the blog sometime ago, but have been so busy that have been unable to start. I found this excellent picture on Flicker, so I thought why not start with this, since it's a landmark in the Palais des Nations garden.

The sculpture was donated in 1971 to the United Nations by the Soviet Government in honor of "The Conquest of Space". Like a shiny metal spear, it pierces the air. While beautiful, I have always found it aggressive, maybe reflecting the spirit of the donor nation at the time, during the glory days of the Cold War.

It is also fitting that the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik being launched into space (October 4, 1957) took place a few days ago. With that satellite, the Soviet Union truly inaugurated the Space Age (and US-USSR Space Race).

From the NASA webpage (http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/):
"The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball (58 cm.or 22.8 inches in diameter), weighed only 83.6 kg. or 183.9 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments."

The sculpture in question was created by sculptors A.P. Faidysh-Krandievsky and Yuri Neroda, and architects Alexander N. Kolchin and M.O. Barshch . It is covered in titanium, and you are sometimes blinded when the sun shines and you look at it at a certain angle. It certainly stands tall at 26 meters (85 feet) and is as impressive as I'm sure its donors wanted it to be. I wonder if Frank Gehry had seen it before he went on to construct all his amazing and impossible metal buildings.

Through some googling, I found out that three of the creators of the monument (Faidysh, Kolchin, and Barshch) also collaborated previously on a similar monument in Moscow, also created to commemorate the launch of the Sputnik.

The monument won a competition out of 350 proposals for the best design of an obelisk celebrating the opening of the Space Era. The grand opening of the monument was on October 4, 1964, on the day of the 7th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch (Source: "Monument to the Conquerors of Space" Wikipedia entry). You can see the Moscow monument at http://wikimapia.org/51192/.