Some public art in Calgary challenges visitors. Some provokes debate.

But there’s only one piece that came close to burning a hole through somebody’s clothing.

After a sun-singed jacket, some software glitches and more than a year with blue construction fence around a beautification project, city officials have removed a $559,000 art sculpture from in front of a northeast Calgary recreation centre, unsure it can be fixed.

The city’s public art program, which spends one per cent of infrastructure budgets on beautification pieces, has long drawn controversies about price, location and esthetic value.

This situation is new.

“It’s a beautiful, shiny object. And that, I think is part of the problem,” said Sarah Iley, the city’s art and culture manager.

The interactive steel piece by a team from Berkeley, California, had complications since it was installed outside the Genesis Centre of Community Wellness in fall 2012.

Inside its hollow hemispheres, people were encouraged to send the artwork text messages. Its interior would translate the characters into a unique light and sound display.

The same default emissions kept coming out instead, Iley said.

Then, one bright spring day last year, a Genesis Centre user walked inside the five-metre-high sphere ­— as you’re supposed to do. The person started thumbing a text message into a cellphone, and then the jacket they were wearing begun feeling warm, Iley explained.

The way the sun bounced off the mirrored concave interior at that moment directed an intense, narrow ray at that visitor’s jacket. It was so intense that ... sssssssssss ...

“When it happened that somebody did actually have a piece of clothing singed, we thought: what the heck’s that about?” Iley said.

The visitor, uninjured, alerted Genesis Centre officials to the problem. Shortly afterwards, the city erected blue fence around Wishing Well, to keep people safeaway from an installation designed to be enjoyed from its inside.

“We started asking questions of the artist, to see what might be causing it. Obviously, it’s the sun,” the city art manager said.

“But the question is: is that going to happen just once? Is it at a certain day and time?”

For more than a year, Iley said the artist from Living Lenses has come up and tried to fix it — by pivoting the structure, hammering it, trying different finishes to dull the interior.

Nothing has worked so far. This week, officials decided to move the piece into storage while the artist tries to remedy his creation — and earn the one-quarter of the project payment the city is withholding.

Living Lenses’ principals could not be reached for comment Wednesday. They are also behind the decorative clocks that adorn one of Calgary’s downtown LRT platforms.

The problems and yearlong delays have frustrated the head of the northeast’s major library and community complex.

“Here you have what’s supposed to be this impressive piece of art and I think it was fairly impressive and then you’ve got this ugly construction fence around it, and it’s at the main entrance, in a place of honour,” Genesis Centre president Carol Steiner said.

“I don’t know if the community ever had the chance to properly experience it. The idea sounded kind of interesting.”