This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 39.6435° S, 176.8457° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Philipp Meier took a single cherry blossom and blew it up until it was architecture.
Prunus Awanui is a bright pink flower at monumental scale in Landmarks Square, Hastings – Hastings District Council's own description is that the work was created by enlarging a blossom to that size, which is the whole method and the whole effect.
Magnification does something to a flower that it does not do to most subjects. A giant banana is still recognisably a banana; a blossom enlarged past a certain point stops reading as a flower at all and becomes structure, with the petals working as planes and the whole thing behaving like a canopy. You have to step back to reassemble it into a blossom.
The colour carries the rest. Hastings sits in Hawke's Bay, one of the great fruit-growing regions of New Zealand, where spring blossom across the orchards is a genuine annual event and the reason a good deal of the district exists. A pink blossom in the town square is the most concentrated possible statement of what the surrounding country does.
Landmarks Square was rebuilt, and the sculpture is a permanent centrepiece of the new space rather than a temporary installation – which matters, because a work at this scale in a civic square is effectively part of the paving plan.
The species reference in the name is exact. Prunus is the genus that covers cherries, plums, peaches and apricots, and it is the tree the Hawke's Bay orchards are built on.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Hastings District Council describes Philipp Meier’s work as a giant sculpture created by blowing up a blossom flower to monumental scale. It is a permanent centrepiece of the rebuilt Landmarks Square.
ACCESS
Public city-centre artwork in Landmarks Square on Warren Street. Treat it as a pedestrian CBD discovery; nearby public parking should be used rather than an attraction-specific stopping pin.
