67The Silver Whirlpool

In the front bed of the EVEN Hotel, among tufts of tan-plumed grass, a broad band of mirror-polished stainless steel rises off a white-tiled pedestal, sweeps up and over, and stops in a needle point at the top right. Inside it a second band makes the same turn, smaller. Inside that, a third curls down to a tip as thin as a pencil line, and a separate crescent rises off the bottom right like a fin. Nothing closes. From across the drive it reads as a set of rings; walk up and it is a whirlpool, stopped mid-turn.

Being a mirror, it is mostly made of the hotel. Four storeys of white wall and blue-curtained windows slide around its curves and bend to whatever the steel is doing at that inch, and the sky runs along the top of the outer band. Up on the facade behind it, the hotel's sign stacks its letters on four tall tiles — orange, blue, green, brown — E-V-E-N.

Then get close to the middle band. Across its top, rows of tiny dots are stippled into the steel, tracing long feathery strokes, like plumes or leaves blown across it. They only show when the sky is lying flat on the metal, and they are the one place on the whole shiny thing that looks drawn rather than bent.

The EVEN opened here in March 2024, the second of three hotels developer Kenny Bhakta set out to cluster along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The Cambria next door came first, in November 2023, with Dorit Levinstein's painted dancers out front. The Holiday Inn Express & Suites on Taylor Street came last, and it has a mirror-steel sculpture of its own, a short walk on.

Who made this one, we can't say. There is no plaque on the pedestal, no signature or date anywhere on the steel, and none of the announcements of the hotel's opening mentions it. If you know who made it, tell us, and we'll put their name on it.