Last

Conceived by Tony Smith, one of America's finest sculptors, Last is a triumphant meeting of art and architecture, both internally and externally. Leaping across the courtyard outside the monolithic Frank Lausche State Office Building, the bright orange, stepped arch serves as the perfect complement to Fred Toguchi's brilliantly designed building. The bizarrely shaped building seems to hover above the level of the street, thanks to the clever, stilted concrete foundation, while Smith's sculpture leaps from the concrete pedestal and soars over into a patch of grass across the yard.

The structure is massive. It is one of the largest pieces in Smith's oeuvre, and one of the finest examples of his architectonic sculpture; sculpture which functions as architecture. The culmination of such gargantuan scale, lively dynamism, and brilliant color is a piece of sculpture that imparts the viewer with a sense of vibrant energy.

Smith worked closely with the building architect, Fred Toguchi, to develop a sculpture that successfully interacted with the building behind it. While there is a great contrast between the color, shape, and feeling of the building and the sculpture, the two objects do parallel one another: mainly in their unique profiles. To use Toguchi's own words from a letter to Smith, "it has many interesting and varied expressions from different locations around the area," not unlike Toguchi's own asymmetrical structure; in fact, the shape of the archway itself is suggestive of the shape of the building from above.