Washington University students create new sculpture for St. Louis Lambert Airport, US

TINNews |

TIN news: St. Louis Lambert International Airport in Missouri, US, has collaborated with graduate students at Washington University to create a 100ft-long public sculpture for installation in Terminal 2.

Over the last four months, eight students from St. Louis county’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design, which is a part of Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, have been working on the project.

The students have digitally designed, modelled and built prototypes for a suspended sculpture that will include colourful translucent polycarbonate sheets within a thin, wire-like lattice of hardened carbon fibre.

Slated to be installed on 21 May, the public sculpture, named Spectroplexus, will be hung over the Terminal 2 Ticketing Lobby of the US airport.

Spectroplexus will be developed from nearly 2,000 subassemblies that will be based on a rhombic grid formed with wrapped spools of carbon fibre. The sub-assemblies will be joined together to form a single flowing, wavelike structure.

In addition, the students have designed the collapsible moulds that will be used for wrapping the carbon fibre structure.

Polycarbonate panels will be cut with a 2D knife plotter in the Sam Fox School’s Digital Fabrication Lab.

"The coloured inks we’re using dry very quickly, which gives the panels a lot of texture."

Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts Digital Fabrication lecturer Lavender Tessmer said: “The concept is based on the hybrid nature of flying machines.

“The wing of an aeroplane is a mechanised form, but it’s also a shape, like the wing of a bird, that we understand from the natural world.

“Carbon fibre is strong, rigid and lightweight, but it also behaves a little unpredictably. There’s variability in the geometry. Polycarbonate is more predictable - it cuts the same every time - but the coloured inks we’re using dry very quickly, which gives the panels a lot of texture.”

St. Louis Lambert Airport is currently working with the eight students on the final details of the sculpture installation.