As Tech Companies Abandon San Francisco, A Towering New Artwork Points Toward A Better Future

Seeking to build the tallest highrise on the San Francisco skyline, Salesforce was compelled to strike a deal with a former post office erected during the Great Depression. The old post office building was nearly four blocks from the plot Salesforce sought to develop. The three-story structure was also an historical landmark. But by the standards of the city’s zoning laws, the historical status and low stature allowed the owners to sell Salesforce ten stories worth of air rights. When completed in 2018, the Salesforce Tower topped off at 1,070 feet.

Five years later, a new structure on Yerba Buena Island is infinitely taller. It isn’t a corporate office or apartment complex. It isn’t even habitable. Point of Infinity is a new sculpture by Hiroshi Sugimoto, the first to be installed under the auspices of San Francisco’s new real estate tax-funded Treasure Island Arts Program.

In technical terms, Point of Infinity has the shape of a pseudosphere, a structure that exists only as a mathematical equation. The pseudosphere’s negative curvature is infinite in extent along its axis of rotation. Given how hard this is for people to imagine, university mathematics departments traditionally taught the geometry using plaster models.

A couple decades ago, Sugimoto found one of these antique ‘stereometric exemplars’ stored away at the University of Tokyo, together with plaster stand-ins for exotic geometries such as the obduloid and the hypersphere. Fabricated in Germany at the end of the 19^th century, the models reminded him of abstract sculptures by artists such as Constantin Brancusi. They also called to mind Marcel Duchamp, whose artwork was often inspired by geometric theories. Taking another Duchampian trope as a prompt, Sugimoto decided to treat the stereometric exemplars as readymades (a term Duchamp used for objects that became artwork simply because the artist chose them).

At the time, Sugimoto’s primary medium was photography. Much of his acclaimed work playfully interrogated the reality of the pictures he took. (For instance, his photographic portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII were taken in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, where he was able to travel through time with his camera.) With equivalent mischief, Sugimoto photographed the diminutive plaster models at close range, tilting his camera to make them appear monumental. Unlike simulacra of deceased British royalty, the scale of a geometric model is arbitrary. The inherent unreality makes any depiction equally realistic. Optical effects offer a glimpse of infinity.

But it was another observation that drew Sugimoto from the darkroom to the skyline. “The concept of zero and infinity were not so much discoveries as human inventions,” he wrote at the time he was photographing the plaster models in Tokyo. “The notion of length with no width is very curious indeed, the pencil line I draw being only an approximation of an invisible mathematical line. Endeavors in art are also mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms.”

Approximation is not a flaw, but a feature. Art has the power to index the mystical.

Sugimoto’s photography of wax figures and plaster models shows how visibly unseen realms can be rendered by an artist. Point of Infinity also has this quality. The difference is that, as a work of public sculpture, Point of Infinity indexes the mystical for an entire city.

As Salesforce vacates the tower that bears its name, and as companies ranging from Oracle to Twitter abandon San Francisco, the mystical promise of a tower approaching infinity may have the appearance of a cosmic joke. At the very least, Point of Infinity may seem an aptly philosophical riposte to all the wrangling over air rights in a city built on instability.

As richly deserved as this commentary may be, we would be better off considering how Point of Infinity might lift San Francisco to new heights. The manifestly materialistic ambitions that San Francisco has pursued since the first dot-com boom have made the city unaffordable to the artists who have historically given it meaning. A tower of infinite height that is neither more nor less than a work of art aptly approximates the infinite potential of a place that values art over money.

Sugimoto’s mystical pseudosphere is the monument that San Francisco needs at this moment. Now that it’s been built, San Francisco needs to reach.