A Brussels Sprout Memory

The Atomium is a monument built for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. It is 335-feet tall, with nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. It was supposed to be a temporary structure but yesterday Belgium celebrated it’s golden anniverary.

I just wasted a half hour looking for a very bad photo I have of me standing in front of The Atomium making it seem like it was growing out of the top of my head or, alternately, a very ornate hat. 1958, huh? Yes, children, I was there; a very callow youth, and the photo shows it (if I can find it) and now, 50 years later, we are both still around even though, unlike myself, The Atomium needed some major repairs. I paid a return visit to Brussels in about 1970 and even then it was looking a bit dingy and the surrounding area had been poorly maintained.

A $43 million renovation on The Atomium finally began in March 2004 and it reopened in Februay of 2006. The renovations included replacing the faded aluminium sheets on the spheres with stainless steel, thus permanently returning the original, spectacular, sheen to its surfaces.

This trip to Belgium in 1958 was my very first sojourn to a foreign soil and is, thus, firmly etched in my memory. It’s sheen, like the surface of the newly clad Atomium, will always be fresh.