As part of the the fifth annual Georgetown Glow lighting festival, architecture and lighting design enthusiasts can find a site-specific, glowing kaleidoscopic installation in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown Waterfront Park. Designed by New York–based architecture and design studio Hou De Sousa, "Prismatic" will be open to the public until Jan. 6.
Made from steel rebar frames and iridescent cords, and illuminated with an array of outdoor ultraviolet LEDs, the vibrant thread art installation was fabricated and assembled in collaboration with Jordan Woodson, a senior structural engineer at Arup, in one month. "We had several goals in mind when designing [Prismatic]," the firm's co-founder Josh de Sousa tells ARCHITECT. "We wanted to define large volumes of space with linear elements, thereby providing transparency and creating moire and color mixing effects. We also wanted to build a light weight, yet durable structure."
"Prismatic" takes the shape of a 700-square-foot rectangular cube, but it is broken into nine irregular sculptural volumes. Visitors can navigate the space in between each volume while taking in semi-obscured views of the nearby Potomac River and the Senator Charles H. Percy Plaza's water fountain. "As visitors turn their gaze or walk about the space, patterns in the background and foreground continuously converge and delaminate, resulting in the perception that static surfaces are somehow in motion," according to the project's description.
Some of Hou de Sousa's previous projects include "Raise/Raze," a temporary installation designed for Washington, D.C.'s DuPont Underground streetcar tunnel, and "Sticks," a lumber structure designed for Socrates Sculpture Park in New York.
"Prismatic" is one of the 10 light art installations designed by 16 artists for this year's edition of the Georgetown Glow lighting festival. The installations are on view until Jan. 6, in various locations in Washington, D.C.
