"Generation is the first piece I thought of as a certified monumental expression. I don’t think of it as personal or subjective. I attempted to make it as urbane and objective as possible."

"This piece was developed from one conceived quite differently in June 1964. The first version was based not upon tetrahedral units but on four spokes of the tetrahedral angle, the lines which if dropped from the vertices would meet at the center of a tetrahedron. The actual spokes were elongated octahedra. The piece was about thirty inches high and was intended to be cast in bronze. It was called Moondog. Later I was asked to do a piece for a city square, and I thought that something more open than most of the work would be appropriate. On the other hand, the existing model was very personal, and I thought that it might cause jaywalking. In attempting to give it a more dignified and stable appearance, I kept compressing the octahedra through about three versions until they became regular. It took about three more versions to bring it to the static quality that it has at present. The whole development took about a year, the model for the present work having been made in the summer of 1965.”

-Tony Smith on Generation