Anchor, Move, Connect: Henry Moore's "Large Arch"

Henry Moore's "Large Arch" stands on the broad plaza of I.M. Pei's Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in downtown Columbus, Indiana. Across the street is Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church, a National Historic Landmark.

The monumental bronze sculpture serves as the plaza’s visual anchor for the surrounding buildings. And yet the sculpture invites us to move under and around it; to allow our eyes to move over its surface to the buildings beyond.

As a gathering place, the library plaza connects local residents with one another and with people and places around the world.

Pei and Moore's Columbus project, realized in 1971, was the first time they collaborated to create a sculpture for a Pei building, but it would not be their last. Their other projects include "Three Forms Vertebrae" (1978) for Dallas City Hall in Dallas, Texas; "Mirror Knife Edge" (1977) for the National Gallery of Art, East Building in Washington, DC; and "Large Reclining Figure" (1984) for Overseas Chinese Banking in Singapore.

Other bronze casts of Moore's "The Arch" (the official title of "Large Arch") can be found at Moore's former home in Perry Green, England, at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, and the Henie Onstad Art Center in Norway.