Richard Lippold, Orpheus and Apollo (soon)
Though not a reality yet, Richard Lippold’s Orpheus and Apollo will soon be fully installed in Terminal B at LaGuardia’s Central Hall, a glass-enclosed connector between the terminal and the AirTrain. The 40-foot-tall sculpture contains 190 bars of metal and about 450 steel wires, weighing a whopping five tons. It was originally installed in 1962 at Lincoln Center, though it was controversially removed in 2014. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger advocated for the sculpture’s new home in Terminal B after a few years of the sculpture’s absence from the public eye; it did not make a return to the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, as it did not fit in the space.
Lippold, who passed away in 2002, was known for his wire sculptures and his teaching at Hunter College and CUNY schools. He is perhaps best known for his Ad Astra, an abstract sculpture at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Some of his other works that were located in New York City included Flight at the PanAm Building, Variation Number 7: Full Moon at the Museum of Modern Art, and Untitled, The Four Seasons, and Seagram Building Construction No. 1.