Granite sphere will grace
Town Square
Rotarians here can’t stop raving about the floating, green granite ball that soon will be the featured attraction at the city’s new Town Square Plaza Park in downtown Kent.
“It’s a pretty amazing sphere,” said Kent Police Capt. Mike Painter, one of several Rotarians who saw the sphere on display June 11 during a private viewing at Seattle Solstice, the company that built the water sculpture. “It almost leaves you speechless when you see the size of it and the engineering it took to place it in a granite socket and the water that keeps it spinning.”
The sphere is 63 feet in diameter and weighs 13,000 pounds. Residents will get a chance to see it for themselves when city officials dedicate Town Square Plaza Park at 11 a.m. on June 28. The 34,500-square-foot urban park sits just west of Second Avenue North between West Smith Street and West Harrison Street.
“It’s spectacular,” said Rotarian Billy Graham. “You can’t believe what you’re looking at.”
The movable sphere is similar to water sculpture projects Seattle Solstice built at Green River Community College in Auburn and at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.
The huge granite ball will float on a pool of water in a granite base in the center of Town Square Plaza Park. Residents will be able to touch the ball to rotate it as part of an interactive feature.
The Rotary Club of Kent and the Kent Sunrise Rotary Club donated the sphere to the city in celebration of the 100 years of Rotary International. Painter served as president of Kent Sunrise Rotary and Graham was president of the Rotary Club of Kent in 2004-2005 when the clubs came up with the idea for the sphere as a community project.
“We modeled it after the sphere at Green River Community College,” Painter said. “The piece at Green River is amazing, but this one is almost twice as big.”
Graham served as the project coordinator and worked closely with artist Stuart Kendall of Seattle Solstice. The company used a 20-ton block of granite from India for the sphere and imported the granite base from China.
“It’s a long project that is coming to conclusion,” Graham said. “We’re very pleased with how it turned out. We’re dedicating it to the city and when we’re all dead, it will still be there.”
City officials have yet to determine which day the sphere will be installed at the park, said City Parks Director Jeff Watling.
“People are going to love it,” Painter said of the interactive sphere. “It will be the centerpiece of the plaza. And they will be able to walk up to it and touch it as it will be surrounded by a film of water.”
Graham said he had concerns whether the 10-horsepower pump at the new city park would be enough to float the sphere. Those concerns disappeared when Graham saw the granite ball floating at the Seattle Solstice headquarters.
“They were able to float the ball with a garden hose because of the hydraulics,” Graham said.
Contact Steve Hunter at 253-872-6600, ext. 5052 or shunter@reporternewspapers.com.
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