Federal Triangle Flowers

Stephen Robin’s monumental cast-aluminum lily and rose, known as the Federal Triangle Flowers, mark the transition between the historic William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building on the east side of the Woodrow Wilson Plaza and the contemporary Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center to the west.  The lily and rose combine Beaux Arts and Art Deco influences, a reference to the transition from one style to the other in the architectural ornament of the various Federal Triangle buildings. Robin stated about his work: “Flowers are used here as they have been used traditionally in the history of ornamentation. They are devices, infinitely variable, used for defining boundaries and affecting the awareness of transitions.”

Robin earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (1966) at Temple University in Philadelphia and his Master of Fine Arts degree (1968) at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He is well known for his public sculptures and has worked in collaboration several times with the Boston-based architecture firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. James Ingo Freed, architect of the Reagan Building, stated that Robin’s sculptures are “inherently interesting as an evocation of public architecture and as a dialog of forms. Large in scale and curiously fleshy in character, they are in constant transition, flickering between the botanical and the zoological.”