Dropped Cone

Cologne, Germany

Installed March 18, 2001
Inaugurated March 19, 2001

Cologne is a crossroads, a place we have found ourselves many a time, where a considerable amount of my past is under lock and key, and where the Mouse Museum was to be permanently installed before it was spirited off to Vienna. Once again, under the heavy chimes of the Dom, we found ourselves in Cologne in January 1998, when a commission reached us for a sculpture to be placed on top of a new mall building on the Neumarkt.

After studying photos taken in Cologne, postcards and souvenirs bought there, and searching our recollections, we decided that the subject would in some way be an ice cream cone. We began with two cones, colliding at the top of the glass-clad tower that would serve as the base, but common-sense engineering soon reduced the subject to one cone, ten meters high, inverted to simulate the "cones" of the skyline, as if it had fallen out of the sky, ice cream melting down the sides of the building.

The proper position and form of the ice cream was defined in clay on a model after many weeks of collaborative trial and error. The model was then brought to the factory of William Kreysler and Associates, in Petaluma, California, north of San Francisco, where it was digitally enlarged and transferred into painted urethane foam and fiberglass under our supervision. Along with the fabricators, who also built the Inverted Collar and Tie installed in Frankfurt, we were in continuous communication with the engineers of the Cologne site about the details of the unique location of the sculpture at the building's edge. Coosje decided that making the ice cream one color, 'vanilla', would create the most archetypical image and architectural form, setting it apart from the kitschy representations of cones in the streets around the site. The vanilla color received a high-gloss clear coat to bring out the fluidity and plasticity of its texture in contrast to the hard geometric form of the cone with its emphatic diamond pattern above it.

After inspection by the engineers from Cologne, the Dropped Cone was brought by truck to San Francisco Bay and loaded on a ship for its trip through the Panama Canal, over the Atlantic Ocean and up the Rhine to its site.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

"The ice cream cone is an elementary all-around symbol of consumerism, with a twist. A contemporary Cornucopia. It invites participation by all the senses. While looking, one can imagine other sensations such as aroma and taste. And it is highly tactile.

"The Cone is a form between sculpture and architecture. It echoes the spires of the Cathedral and other churches that project above the buildings of Cologne and are the most characteristic shapes in the skyline. But, the Cone differs in being slanted, and the melting ice cream, running down the sides of the building's glass walls, is a sign of evanescence rather than eternity."

Coosje van Bruggen

Fabricated by William Kreysler and Associates, Petaluma, California. Engineer: Juri Komendant; Project Managers: William Kreysler and Serge Labesque
Commissioned by Neumarkt Galerie

Dropped Cone being fabricated at Kreysler

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