FROM 4 INCHES TO 22 FEET

In 1992, architect and artist John C. Portman Jr. commissioned Miles & Generalis Studios to translate his four-inch maquette for Ballet Olympia into monumental 22-foot sculptures.

Working from Portman’s original, Tom Miles, Alex Generalis and their team enlarged the sculpture 66 times its original size—preserving its proportions, curves and relationships at an entirely different scale.

The work was completed over several months inside the Miles & Generalis Studios workshop in Philadelphia, where the team engineered the internal structure and built and sculpted the full-scale forms by hand.

Long before digital scanning became commonplace, monumental enlargement demanded a combination of mathematics, sculpture, fabrication, and an extraordinary understanding of three-dimensional form.

The completed sculptures were created for Portman’s Atlanta development.

Artist: John C. Portman Jr.
Enlargement & Fabrication: Miles & Generalis Studios
Principals: Tom Miles & Alex Generalis
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 1992