That vision was made real this year when a British sculptor, Sir Antony Gormley, completed Infinite Cube and credited Mitchell for the idea.

The sculpture, with its matrix of copper wire and 1,000 hand-soldered omni-directional LED lamps, was unveiled in February at The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, located south of the Loop in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. In mid-September, it will be moved to its own permanent space, according to Gabriel’s father, W. J. Thomas Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago.

Gabriel (right) lived at Marina City while he studied documentary filmmaking at Columbia College. He also worked as a produce clerk at a nearby Jewel-Osco. (Above) Closer view of Infinite Cube. (Click on image to view larger version.)

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he suffered from auditory hallucinations in which passing thoughts are amplified into a cacophony of sneering, self-destructive voices. On June 24, 2012, the voices overwhelmed Gabriel and he jumped from the balcony of his apartment on the 59th floor of Marina City’s west tower.

He left behind the concept of Infinite Cube and Gormley, a friend of Thomas Mitchell who had met Gabriel and was familiar with his work, offered to fabricate it.

“He shared his perceptions about his own, you could say, condition of consciousness,” says Gormley (left) about Gabriel, in a video produced by Smart Museum of Art. “He was unselfconscious, completely open about the research that he did, in a way, on his own perceptions of the world.”

Gormley is arguably best known for Angel of the North, a 66-foot tall steel sculpture located on a hill near Gateshead, England. Completed in 1998, the sculpture is of an angel with a 177-foot wingspan.

Infinite Cube, says Professor Mitchell, reminds him of the short story The Aleph, in which Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, who often wrote about infinity, describes a point in space that contains all other points.

Dan Russell, a contractor and audio-video expert who lives at Marina City, says he is making a video about the artwork and plans to project it on the observation deck of Marina City’s west tower and at river level across from the Riverwalk.