The lobby of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s
new Zuckerman Research Center
anticipated a feature art wall as a central component of the active entry space
connecting Sixty-Eighth and Sixty-Ninth Streets on the Upper East Side of New
York City. LTL designed a piece that would at once visually seduce and reflect
back the activity of the lobby. It began as a solid wall, three feet six inches
deep, thirty feet wide, and twelve feet six inches tall. A series of 230 vision
cones, emanating from station points mapped in plan and section and identifying
the typical location of human activity within the lobby, is projected into the
wall, creating conical intersections. These vision cones are controlled by a
regular grid on the side of the wall that faces the main lobby area yet exit
the back of the wall in a seemingly random collection of variously sized
ellipses. As users of the lobby move around the sculpture, conical alignments
embedded in the wall become visible, identifying 230 precise source locations
throughout the lobby. The experience is designed to intensify the public,
social aspects of the space.
View Original