Preservation Efforts Save Riggs’ “Hammer and Sickle”

By In Plain Site on July 23, 2026 • ( Leave a comment )

Frank P. Riggs’ modernist sculpture at the corner of 500 East and 100 South in Salt Lake City.

That it was installed during the Cold War didn’t help. Neither did the color. Or the reaction by the general Utah public to abstract art. When this sculpture was first erected in 1982, some saw in the sculpture a hammer and sickle.

Anchoring the entrance plaza of what is now known as Arbor 515, this abstract grouping by Frank Riggs complements the building’s distinctive modernist architecture. Crisp corners, sweeping curves, a rigid steel composition—it all echoes the forms and materials of the 14-story office tower. But it doesn’t just disappear into the architecture. It bold colors and crisp elements create a visual dialogue between sculpture, plaza and architecture. Contemporary critic Jack Goodman noted that the piece draws attention to both the building and its public space, reinforcing the project’s emphasis on simple forms, careful proportions and the interplay of light and shadow.

Architect Bill Browning had his own reasons for the plaza the sculpture sits in—a city zoning required the tower to be set back from the street, since it was going up in what was then a non-commercial stretch of Fifth East. The setback became, in his telling, “a major part of the design problem.” Frank Riggs’s sculptural grouping filled the space the problem created. Riggs came to Utah and took up sculpture at a moment when the state’s public art was just beginning to reckon with minimalism and abstraction, working in a strict, clean geometric idiom that set him apart from contemporaries like Angelo Caravaglia’s fountains or Richard Johnston’s spindlier, more figurative work. His use of that distinctive “Calder red” color helps identify his works across the state, from Logan to St. George.

The building has outlived its own name twice over. First it was the Wilde Wood Tower, then Eaton-Kenway (for its most prominent occupant), and now, after a major redevelopment, Arbor 515. The tower was converted into 96 units of affordable housing by the Utah Perpetual Housing Fund, returning the space from the commercial to the residential. The tower won Preservation Utah’s 2026 Adaptive Reuse award for a project that kept Browning’s stacked-L massing, its walkouts and gardens, its brick-and-steel face, all of it too young in 2023 to qualify for the National Register and exactly the kind of building that usually gets torn down instead.

What the award write-up doesn’t mention is the sculpture. Which likely would have gone to the dump with everything else if the building had been torn down. Out front, flanked by landscaping that leads the eye up from the street corner, Riggs’s grouping is still there — separate rigid steel elements, reading as a unified piece from some angles (and communist propaganda from others).

Discover more odds at ends at the Utah Art Map!