Sun Wheel: A Sundial and Sculptural Emblem for a Historical Park

Sundials are seriously outdated timepieces. This does not mean, however, that they are not meaningful -- even valuable – for today’s society. By their very nature sundials elicit contemplation on time, place, and history, and Sun Wheel, a 1900 lb. cast iron dial installed this past September in Highland Park, Illinois, is uniquely designed for such contemplation.

 When the sculptor Margaret Lanterman and I made our winning proposal to design a historical park honoring the founder’s of Highland Park, we included my design for a monumental polar dial in the form of a seven foot iron wheel as one of two sculptural focal points within the park. The second sculpture, Staffs, by Lanterman is a cluster of oversized walking staffs cast in bronze and set on a footpath which wends through the park and along the border of an adjacent pioneer cemetery.

 Expressing History

 The two sculptures allude to the role of travel in the history of the community. Once a smattering of inns and vacation cottages for wealthy Chicagoans, Highland Park was founded when a rail line was built in 1858 to provide direct access to downtown Chicago. This rail line, the North Shore Railroad, is still one of the major commuter lines into Chicago and runs past the park. Sun Wheel’s sleek industrial profile and iron construction commemorate rail’s role in the community’s history.

 The dial, however, takes its actual shape from the wheels of a small, sturdy cart called a charrette, which early French pioneers introduced to the Midwest for hauling rock. Rather than spokes, a single thick wooden plank braced each wheel. This plank struck me as an ideal format on which to demarcate a polar dial; and streamlining the form of a primitive cart to suggest early industrial-age machinery seemed a good solution for representing historical progress.

 Both the North Shore Railroad and a far older line of travel, the Green Bay Trail, skirt the western edge of Founders Park. Once a Native American thoroughfare between Chicago and Green Bay, the trail has since carried pioneer traffic and today is a major recreational route for cyclist, hikers and runners. Lanterman’s sculpture of walking staffs pays tribute to this ancient trail and the oldest inhabitants of the area.

Time and Place

 Most importantly, the two sculptures embody contrasting and complementary notions of time. In Lanterman’s case time plays out in poetic terms: the staffs symbolize leadership and stand on its trail to be picked up by future leaders on the path of history. Their location beside the pioneer cemetery adds poignancy to this metaphor.

Sun Wheel, on the other hand, embraces a more calculated and cyclic notion of time: time as a rotating wheel determined by the mechanics of earth and sun. This same image echoes in its siting. The sculpture rests at the center of a small circular plaza ringed by stone benches. Beyond this a circle of berms adds the effect of an ancient earthen henge. Like all dials Sun Wheel expresses geometry based on an assumption that the dial sits poised at the center of the apparent universe; that the sun encircles and wheels about our particular point on the earth.

 One important design decision was to exclude a longitude adjustment (the park is located at 87 degrees, 46 minutes and 18 seconds west longitude) and an equation of time. Since the dial is to honor the founders, I elected to portray time as experienced prior to the inception of time zones; to a time when clocks were set to local time as determined by the sun and when clocks were set by noon marks. There is an irony here in that it was the needs of rail travel, which, in 1885, contributed to the introduction of time zones.

 Construction

 Since I sought to emphasize the symbolic rather than functional purposes of Sun Wheel, the dial face is calibrated only to the half hour. Nevertheless, it is highly accurate. A careful reading, allowing adjustments for date and longitude, evinces accuracy within one or two minutes of clock time. This comes, I believe, from the quality of work performed by my subcontractors. The precision of the original pattern, built from my specifications by Chicago Heights Pattern Company, and the superb casting by St. Marys Foundry in Ohio held the warping across the plane of the dial face to within 2/1000 of an inch of true. It may be flatter, but this is the tolerance of my instruments.

 Using a light solution of ferric nitrate, I induced a thin layer of rust on the surface of Sun Wheel. This was sealed with three reduced coats of a graffiti-proof urethane. The gnomon is capped with a machined steel bar spliced to the casting in order to ensure a true edge. It also provides a strong central accent and reinforces the industrial feel of the sculpture.

St. Marys Foundry is the most highly rated iron foundry in the United States and one of the most historic. Their superb work on this dial and on another of my solar sculptures came out of an exceptional attention and employee devotion to these projects. This has led to a collaborative relationship between the foundry and myself with no profit accruing to the foundry. The foundry sees their gain in the highly visible evidence of quality and the worker pride, which the collaboration fosters.

The workers’ pride comes in part from seeing a form akin to the industrial machine parts they cast daily transformed into a major public monument. A second source of pride, I believe, is to realize that a machine part they produced is destined to work in synch with the mechanism of the heavens.