Crowning Achievement The Giant Aluminum-and-steel ``firefly'' Atop The Pnc Center Along I-95 Was Created By An Artist With A Passion For Public Art. This Isn't The Only City Where He Has Done Such Eye-catching Work.

There were no helicopters swooping in low, bearing great, gangly steel spiders suspended from their bellies.

No police shut down highways to prevent hulking loads of sculpture from crashing down atop oblivious holiday drivers.

In the absence - this time - of piercing sirens and thwackata-thwackata-thwackata, there was only a small, relatively placid group: New York artist R.M. Fischer, a few building officials, a handful of gawkers, and workers from Campbellsville Industries - ``the Steeple People'' - up from Kentucky for the day with a load of art.

All were gathered in a chilly drizzle for the assembly and hoisting of Firefly, Fischer's 72-foot-long illuminated, aluminum-and-steel sculpture, to the pancake top of the PNC Bank Operations Center at 8800 Tinicum Blvd., off Interstate 95 opposite the airport.

It was just a routine installation of a $200,000, five-ton piece of public art that would crown a low-slung, boxy data center and transform it from an anonymous blip sliding by at 60 miles an hour into a head-turning fantasy of flight and speed with a soupcon of Flash Gordon and Pontiac hood ornament.

``I want to give the building a little jolt,'' Fischer said as he gazed at the first of two shiny 25-foot spires being bolted to a large steel cube - part of an installation process that would take hours.

``I've done this so many times,'' Fischer said with a sigh, patiently watching a hole being drilled. ``It takes forever.''

For Fischer - who has experienced both sirens and helicopters during past installations - the day capped a 2 1/2-year process of scoping out and pondering the PNC site; talking and negotiating with officials and architects from PNC and Liberty Property Trust, the building developer; working with officials at the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia, which required the installation of art in return for helping Liberty in building-site acquisition; designing and redesigning the work; and haggling and consulting with the Steeple People, who fabricated Firefly's central steel cube and two spires that flare out like pointy wings.

Public art is, perhaps first and foremost, a collective act. And Fischer, who also does what he calls ``studio work'' and currently has a show at the Deitch Projects gallery in New York City, is more or less comfortable with the process, if not always thrilled by it.