Although this 5-ft wide hecatonicosachoron is made of welded and then electroplated stainless steel, the rigid wire frame sculpture weighs only some 30 pounds. From a sufficiently high ceiling, it can easily be hung. Through remarkable foreDsight on my part, our house has a room whose ceiling is nearly 25 feet high. But this presented a logistical problem, and not one without its own dangers. How exactly does one hang a newly acquired 30 lb, 120-cell? How could I get 25 feet up to put a hook into the ceiling? Would I need scaffolding? Wouldn't a ladder get in the way of the sculpture? And once installed, how would I get the beast down again? What will I do when I sell the house?

At first, climbing a ladder to reach the apex of the library ceiling, I used a stud finder to mark where support might be. At one point I lost control of the ladder, and injured my knee. Then I decided, a big hook in the ceiling would look ugly: in order to raise and lower the ball, it would require a pulley system, possibly a full block and tackle. And there would have to be some way to tie the support cable off to a wall somewhere in the same room. All of which would detract from the simple beauty of the beast.

So I bit the bullet, and resolved to do it right.

A hole in a second floor closet's ceiling provided access into the attic crawl space, between the house's roof above and various room ceilings below. The first problem was the fiberglass insulation everywhere, about to make life itchingly miserable. I retreated to buy a face mask to keep the glass dust out of my lungs. Gloves and long shirts and pants made the rest of this work, during summer days in July, a maximally sweaty endeavor. The second problem: I could place my feet only on the horizontal wooden studs. Otherwise, my feet would crash through the fiberglass-covered sheetrock nailed in from below, a rather unnerving prospect given that only the sheetrock lay between a misstep off of a stud and a 25 foot drop to the unseen floor below. Worse, nearly everywhere there was not enough room even to sit upright; the work area was only about 30 inches high. I again retreated, this time to buy and install pine boards, so that I could sit scrunched and slide back and forth safely to my destination. Or lie down when I got tired. The distance from the attic entrance to the work area was about 40 feet and around a corner, so I wired up a work light, too.

About three to four feet from the back wall is where the sculpture's cable support could go down through a hole at the ceiling apex (red circle). I pushed a nail into the apex of the ceiling. I knew which two studs the hole had to be between, from my earlier ladder-based measurements. A nylon string pushed through let me see from below where the eventual cable would enter the room. I added a weight so I could know where to begin installing pulleys vertically above the hole. I didn't wish to put any stress on the adjacent sheetrock, which otherwise would be cut like butter when the eventual 30 lbs was applied.