Nearly 50 years after its disappearance from Washington’s Meridian Hill Park, Carl Paul Jennewein’s armillary sphere once again graces the stage. Kreilick Conservation is proud to announce the completion of the Noyes Armillary Sphere, originally created in the 1930s, damaged and lost in the 1970’s, and painstakingly reconstructed and reinstalled in 2024, allowing it to reclaim its place in the public sphere.

Carl Paul Jennewein’s original Noyes Armillary Sphere, one of five original artworks commissioned for Meridian Hill Park, was characterized by its decorative band of relief sculpture work depicting the twelve Greek astrological signs, and a central sculpted figure of a winged cherub with hands clasped over his chest, which is the only original element to survive, protected for posterity by the Smithsonian Museum.

Carl Paul Jennewein, Noyes Armillary Sphere, 1935, bronze, Meridian Hill Park, Washington, D.C. Archival Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Carl Paul Jennewein, Noyes Armillary Sphere, 1935, bronze, Meridian Hill Park, Washington, D.C. Archival Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

For nearly 40 years, the armillary sphere stood at the foot of the iconic cascading waterfall of Meridian Hill Park, but the structure succumbed to vandalism, damaged to a point where it was deemed unsafe and removed from the park for repairs. The removal was intended to be temporary, but for nearly 50 years, the armillary sphere base remained bare. The story took an extraordinary turn when the National Park Service offered the team at Kreilick Conservation an opportunity to resurrect the long-lost sculpture.

NPS employees, determined to reproduce the park sculpture, created an accurate scale model of the original sculpture with the help of their sheet metal shop. Constructed of sheet aluminum the 1 to 1 scale-model served as a physical record of the measurements and geometry of the piece. In addition to this scale model, the team at Kreilick referenced archival photos of the original piece as well as images of Jennewein’s original plaster molds and sketches to faithfully reproduce Jennewein’s work. Using state-of-the-art 3D modeling software, FDM prototyping, CNC pattern milling, and investment bronze casting, Kreilick brought the researched design to bronze reality.

“It was an intensely honest review and revise process to get the sculptural elements just right.” 

Left: Archival photo of the Noyes Armillary Sphere courtesy of the National Parks Service. Right: Kreilick Conservation’s 3D render of the Noyes Armillary Sphere.

Kreilick’s drawings of the zodiac signs from the equatorial band of the Armillary Sphere based on photographs of Jennewein’s original plaster casts.

Translating the sculpture from a virtual format to bronze adds a new challenge to the ancient art of the foundry. A CNC router and FDM printing were used to create dimensional patterns of 3d modelled parts. Conventional mold making was used to duplicate the patterns in wax, which are then used in the lost-wax casting process. All the cast parts were welded to form a rugged outdoor sculpture. The finish was determined after review to suggest the age of the original while providing a stable patina finish.

After a 50-year absence, the Noyes Armillary Sphere once again stands proudly at Meridian Hill Park, both a faithful recreation of the original and a testament to the possibilities of modern technology and the power of determination and collaboration.

Assembling the printed pattern of the zodiac signs in preparation for casting.

Resource Highlight

Interested in armillary spheres generally? Check out:

Aterini, Barbara. “The Armillary Sphere: A Representation of the Celestial Sphere and Knowledge Symbol,” in Explorations in the History and Heritage of Machines and Mechanisms: 7th International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms, edited by Marco Ceccarelli and Rafael López-Garcia (Springer, 2022), 330-342.

For more on the history of the Noyes Armillary Sphere:

O’Day, James. “Sphere Not.” Landscape Architecture Magazine 104, no. 8 (Aug 2014): 168. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4479043.

For more details about the sculpture and its reconstruction, visit: