San Francisco International Airport
Terminal 3
Post TSA
This is Sky by Merge Conceptual Design. Merge Conceptual Design is comprised of Franka Diehnelt and Claudia Reisenberger who are both architecture graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and currently teach at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Sky is a suspended light sculpture comprised of 27 mirror-polished stainless steel spheres in varying sizes. The globes are hollow with circular openings oriented at various angles. The interior of the globes is painted an even matte blue, and illuminated by LED edge lighting that creates a soft interior glow. A computerized program will cause the lights within the globes to brighten and dim at various intervals creating an ever changing pattern of light.
According to Merge, the installation explores the human perception of space. The exterior of the mirrored spheres use reflections to camouflage themselves in their surroundings; they reflect their environment, and distort and reproduce it in miniature. The optical effect caused by the blue interior and the edge lighting will cause the viewer to lose a sense of the spheres’ proportions as objects. Through subtle shifts in color and light intensity the space will become unreadable – both expanding and flattening at the same time.
Sky was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for $290,000.