Look at the back of the Grand Éléphant before you look at the elephant. There’s a house up there. Little pavilions with red pointed gables and open doorways sit on its flanks, iron balconies wrap around them, and a canvas canopy on curved ribs shades a top deck where, on the day I took this, a school group in yellow hi-vis vests was waving at everybody on the ground. A man on the lower balcony waved back at my camera.

Nobody standing in the plaza in December is looking at the sculpture. They are looking at a tree, and behind it a limestone slab that goes up further than the phone can frame. But the block they are standing on holds the most ambitious coordinated art commission ever attempted on a private American site, executed by roughly thirty artists working to a single written program, and it has never really been repeated.