Metropolis

 

Location: City Hall

Date photo taken: 1 April 2015

Just inside the main doors of Toronto City Hall, on the east wall, is this large scale work by David Partridge. It's really worth a visit. This image shows the central portion, and it really doesn't do the piece justice. 

The winner of an art competition held in 1974, this "nailie", as it is sometimes called, is the artist's interpretation of a great city, or metropolis, with its central core, its ravines, and its suburbs. It's called a nailie because it's constructed of over 100,000 individual nails, made of different materials and hammered to differing depths. The effect elicits comparisons to both the topography of a city, and to the individuals that inhabit it. As an added bonus, the durable materials allow for perhaps greater interaction than a piece of public art would normally afford. William Denton, as part of "Listening to Art", even drops a coin down through the nails and records the sound as it pings its way to the bottom (jump to about 10:50 to catch the sound).