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Installation of the new Echelman sculpture begins

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Rebecca Maloney Rebecca Maloney Americas Press Office ,Boston
4 May 2015

Janet Echelman’s latest aerial sculpture, for which Arup is the lead engineering designer, is taking shape above Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Arup’s fifth collaboration with Studio Echelman in North America and Studio Echelman’s tallest and highest sculpture to date was unveiled on 3 May 2015 and will remain in place through October. Commissioned by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Echelman’s sculpture for Boston is an original design inspired by the transformation of the city’s waterfront following the Big Dig and the creation of the mile-and-a-half-long Greenway.

The half-acre fibre net sculpture is being installed 365ft above the Greenway and will span up to 600ft between three high-rise buildings. Our primary role was to create the geometric and structural design for the pre-stressed rope network that supports and forms an integral part of the sculpture. The firm also developed custom in-house software which implements an “adaptive form-finding” algorithm to optimise the geometry and structure of the sculpture.

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For this piece, the engineering and physical constraints of the site directly influenced the sculpture’s overall form. Our first task was to identify buildings with sufficient reserve capacity to resist the many tens of thousands of pounds of force the sculpture will exert in this particularly windy urban corridor of Boston. The building capacities and their geometric constraints directly influenced the form, density, and overall composition of the piece. As such, the sculpture can be viewed as the physical manifestation of the potential energy embodied within the Greenway itself. The result is stunning. ” Patrick McCafferty Patrick McCafferty Associate Principal, Americas East Education Leader

Bringing the piece to life at night through the use of light is a priority for this project. Arup’s lighting design solution enables the artist’s vision of the sculpture to be realised in the night-time environment through careful coordination of lighting equipment that blends seamlessly within the urban fabric.

Forty-four individually programmed LED lights illuminate the sculpture and create a unique experience on the Greenway.

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Designing the lighting to not only illuminate such a large piece, but also work with the existing Boston infrastructure was a huge challenge. The result, however, is a brilliant realisation of Janet’s vision for her art in the night-time urban environment. ” Jake Wayne Jake Wayne Senior Lighting Designer