pars pro toto/pärz ˌprō ˈtōtō/ 1. a part or aspect of something taken as representative of the whole.” the magical law of pars pro toto” Google’s English dictionary by Oxford Languages.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I joined Mike Iverson on an almost empty Stanford Campus to see a group of stone spheres.

Like many wonders in my life, great and small, I wouldn’t have known about this if it hadn’t been for Mike. He has been one of the most influential people in my life. I met him when I was a freshman in High School where he introduced me to smoking cigarettes and, maybe fifteen years later, introduced me to smoking pot (we weren’t still in High School). He was my first backpacking buddy, and in 1973, he took me to Death Valley for my first time – camping up a long, rough, dirt road to the Mahogany Campground at 8110 feet, in my new BMW Bavaria I should add – igniting my lifetime love. We listened to classical music together and, when Mike worked in a hi-fi store, spent days listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on different speakers. For a while, Mike worked in a nursery and I was introduced to a new world of plants and especially cactus and succulents. In 1959, Mike told me about a photo show at the Stanford Union where I first saw Ansel Adams and started to fall in love with photography, and last week, he introduced me to a group of stone spheres in the newish Stanford Science and Engineering Quad. The spheres, together, are titled Pars pro Toto and they are terrific.

But first, an aside. Surrounding the new Science and Engineering Quad is sort of a mini-history of Silicon Valley’s second wave and makes a good advertisement for Stanford’s place in that universe.

Bordering the quad on the northeast is the James and Anna Marie Spilker Engineering and Applied Sciences Building which houses the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory. According to Stanford, James Spilkera Jr. was a central figure in the technical development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Edward L. Ginzton was the co-founder of Varian Associates.

On the northwest is the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering, named for Ram and Vijay Shriram who contributed $61 million towards the building. BTW, Ram has a hyper-brief, hyper-enigmatic Wikipedia page saying only that he was born 1956/57, then jumping to Early Life which only says Shriram holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Loyola College, Chennai of the University of Madras, and finally, ending under Career, it says He is a founding board member of Google and…He is also on the board of directors of Alphabet (Google), Paperless Post, Yubico, Abacus.AI, Antheia, GoForward, and EasyPost.

To the southwest is the Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment + Energy Building (Y2E2) which, Stanford says, was the first large-scale, mixed-use, high-performance building at Stanford to house cross-disciplinary teams and programs with teaching and research focused on sustainability. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Jerry Yang is the co-founder of Yahoo!, and Akiko Yamazaki, is chairman of the board, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and co-founder, Wildlife Conservation Network.

Finally, to the southeast, is the Huang engineering building and the Terman Engineering Library. Jensen Huang’s Link-In page says I founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to solve the problem of 3D graphics for the PC. Our invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and revolutionized parallel computing. GPU computing went on to ignite modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world…We’re hiring, with openings in every corner of our company – looking for talented, driven, and adventurous people who want to tackle grand challenges that are hard to solve, matter to the world, and bring us joy.

As an aside to the aside, except for Spilker, who was born in Philadelphia, every one of these building eponyms – I tried namesakes but was told by Google that eponyms is a better word, a word, BTW, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard before – came here as immigrants and changed the world. They are Silicon Valley royalty. End asides.

Between these buildings is a rather non-descript quadrangle or Quad, as now seems to be the universal shorthand, that is largely concrete pavers covering the roof over a warren of semi-underground labs that connect the buildings. This expanse of beige is enlivened by Pars pro Toto, twelve stone spheres, ranging in size from sixteen inches to eight feet, a site-specific art installation by Alicja Kwade. Alicja Kwade is a Polish woman artist living in Berlin but who works all over the world. She reminds me a little of Christo in her self-marketing abilities and the power of her art over the landscape. This miniature landscape and these stone spheres remind me both of Christo’s running fence in Marin County and The Umbrellas that he put up on the 5 straddling Tejon Pass.

Like the yellow umbrellas at Tejon pass, which is the only Christo installation I’ve actually seen in person, it is surprising how much presence the spheres have. Even from hundreds of feet away, as we enter the Quad, walking down an unnamed, palm tree colonnade, the spheres stand out. While we were admiring one of the spheres – I think it was Red Fire, a fine-grained, deep rusty red, sedimentary rock formed about 750 to 700 million years ago in what would become northwestern India – a woman approached us to talk about the installation. It turns out that she is on the committee that selects Stanford’s outside art and she was thrilled that we were thrilled. It seems that this is the first of two major art installations that Stanford is installing.

This installation cost was one million dollars which seems like a bargain given that a Jeff Koons’s Rabbit just sold for $91,075,000. It must have taken a good part of the cost to find, quarry, and shape each sphere, each of which comes from a different location. One of the things our impromptu guide especially liked was the artist’s method of locating the spheres. In her Artist Statement, Kwade says The positioning of the globes was determined by chance: The artist threw tiny spheres onto a model of the Stanford Science and Engineering Quad to dictate placement. This gesture implies a higher being playing marbles with these planet-like spheres, creating a new universe. The arrangement also references billiard breaks, a real-world action used to visualize quantum analogs.

This week, in which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report came out and Afghanistan’s collapse is accelerating, it was especially comforting to be distracted. Congrats, Stanford.