The smokestack of the local power plant in Turku, Finland, bears the first ten numbers of the Fibonacci sequence in glowing letters seven feet high.
The artist, Mario Merz, had been obsessed with the sequence for nearly 30 years when he added the numbers in 1995; he’d already added them to a chapel in Paris and a spire in Turin. It was the first commission of the Turku City Environmental Art Project in 1994. The artist, Mario Merz (Italy) calls it Fibonacci Sequence 1-55 and says "it is a metaphor of the human quest for order and harmony among chaos." Architectural design using the Golden Ratio or Fibonacci numbers was prevalent in Renaissance art and architecture. The first nine numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and 55, denote the radii of the various circles in the design. It also appears in nature. For example, in the perfect wave... |