Perpetual Motion
Paris has the Eiffel Tower. London has Tower Bridge and Big Ben. New York has the statue of Libery and the Empire State building.. And Naas has…
Well, everyone knows it as the ‘Big Ball’. Familiar to anyone who has driven down the N7/M7 from Dublin, heading for Limerick, Cork, Waterford, the south and southwest. It featured in a Guinness advert starring a young Michael Fassbender, and in several popular Irish memes.
Officially, it’s called Perpetual Motion.
The spherical structure is a tubular steel sphere, approx 9m in diameter, onto which a 50mm layer of concrete was sprayed to create the road-like surface effect once the surface was painted.
It was the winning art concept in an anonymous competition held by Kildare County Council in 1993.
Perpetual Motion, by artists Remco de Fouw and Rachael Joynt, was built at the site on the Naas bypass.
The road arrows suggest the movement of air and water currents over the surface of a globe and follow the main flow of traffic towards Dublin, across the bridge and particularly along the turn off for Naas.
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