River Center
136 East 3rd Street
Davenport, Iowa 52801

Sol LeWitt's untitled tower stands against the River Center, near its south entrance. It is made of four 21 foot high slabs of concrete bolted to a framework of steel I-beams. Each slab weighs 12,500 lbs. The outer surface is a special "super white" concrete made of crushed marble and silica. The patterns on the tower reflect the River Center's architectural forms.

About 30 Quad-Citians helped with the installation of this work of art, including art students, plasters, carpenters, painters, cement finishers, laborers, iron workers, crane operators, truck drivers, and electricians. Custom-built forms, utilizing over a mile of Styrofoam strips, were used to cast the tower.

The untitled tower is one of the three works at the River Center designed by LeWitt. The other two works are in the Center's atrium. Each interior work, made with India ink on plaster, is titled "Wall Drawing". These minimalist drawings are approximately 18 feet in length. They were drawn by Anthony Sansotta with assistance by Harry Allers, Kari Cobler and John O'Donovan. Compositionally, the wall drawings relate to the tower's patterns.

Sol LeWitt is an international known Minimalist-Conceptualist artist. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1929. Early in the 1960s he wanted to establish a distinctly new type of art, and began construction modules using the simplest geometric forms. In the early '80s, when this tower was designed, LeWitt's work had begun to focus on three basic geometric shapes -the circle, square and cone- with linear detailing and increasingly simplistic design.