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Protagoras by Charles Ginnever
Photo CreditCarol M. Highsmith Photography
Protagoras
Photo CreditCarol M. Highsmith Photography

Protagoras

Artist
Year1976
Classification sculpture
Medium cor-ten steel
Dimensions10 x 30 x 14 ft. (304.8 x 914.4 x 426.7 cm)
Credits Commissioned through the Art in Architecture Program
Fine Arts Collection
U.S. General Services Administration
Location
  • Charles Ginnever’s Protagoras, created for the plaza of the Warren E. Burger Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, is a dynamic study of contrasts.  Ginnever arranged angular slabs of steel in a delicate, origami-like composition.  The sculpture’s complex interplay of opposing forces—positive and negative space, edge and surface, darkness and light—shifts according to the position and perspective of each viewer.  Ginnever titled this sculpture after the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, who is widely associated with the concept of relativism, and the oft-quoted maxim “Man is the measure of all things.”