Big Bronze Book - The Public Casting of Cities collaborative was initiated in 1999 with a grant from the University at Buffalo. The purpose of this collaborative was to explore new forms of public art, and in particular, how public art contributes to the construction of civic identity. From the onset, this multidisciplinary collaborative took the approach of bringing together issues and methods found in Art, Architecture, History, and Planning.
Given that the two-thousand-pound bronze book was conceived in 1999, the collaborative began to see it as homage to the Twentieth Century- a “final book” in a time when sophisticated technologies threaten to eliminate traditional physical books, as we know them.