In Orbit with Tomas Saraceno

June, 25 2013 • 10:00

Posted inArchitecture

Argentinian artist and architect Tomàs Saraceno has done it again. After the installation “On Space Time Foam” built in Hangar Bicocca in Milan during the winter season 2012/13, he has finalised his 3 yearlong project to build the largest-to-date spider web frame high above the piazza K21 Ständehaus museum, Dusseldorf.

 

 

 

 

In collaboration with engineers, architects and arachnologists (spider and spider web experts) Tomas created a suspended steel wire net structure on three different levels with half a dozen inflated PVC spheres 25 meters above the ground and over a 2550sqm area, just below the museum’s vast glass cupola.

 

 

 

 

Audacious visitors can climb onto this transparent installation and move around while interacting with the surrounding spheres and people, thus creating an “oscillating network of relationships, resonances and synchronous communication”.

 

 

 

 

Visually light and airy, the construction actually weighs 3 tons and the spheres, purposely made for the Ständhaus, are around 300kg.

 

“For me, the work visualizes the space-time continuum, the three-dimensional web of a spider, the ramifications of tissue in the brain, dark matter, or the structure of the universe. With ‘In Orbit,’ proportions enter into new relationships; human bodies become planets, molecules, or social black holes.” (Tomàs Saraceno)

 

 

 

 

In Orbit opens on 21st June 2013 at K21 Ständehaus, Dusseldorf.

 

 

 

 

Images © Tomas Saraceno © Wilfried Meyer