Kubaltos 1967 1968
Kubaltos is the result of Francois Dallegret’s collaboration with Walter Netsch, the acclaimed head architect of the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) during the 1960s, for the new University of Illinois campus.  Netsch’s campus followed his signature architectural aesthetic he called Field Theory, in which basic square shapes were arranged into complex geometric components radiating out from cores, thereby promising programmatic and structural flexibility. Kubaltos was originally designed as four soaring towers, composed of one to four columns diminishing in diameter as they progressively increased in height, each one supporting a cubic capital and set on the monumental raised campus plaza. While this version remained unrealised, Dallegret subsequently issued Kubaltos in 1967 as a set of Perspex and chrome-plated sculptures, at the Moos Gallery in Toronto.  And the name?  KUB = cube; ALTO = haut (in Latin); and since there are four… ALTOS!
Edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs