Phoenix

Art is at the heart of the architecture of the recently completed HOK-designed shuttle stations serving the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Among the half-dozen works on view, Blue Stratus, a luminous ceiling installation, serves as a bold entrance to this major new point of access to the airport.

“We're interested in the underlying stories of a place,” says architect Mario Madayag, who conceived the competition-winning scheme with artist Michael Parekowhai after they learned from a local exhibit that Arizona's desert was once ocean. “That became the inspiration for the work, along with Arizona's big blue sky.”

The designers wanted to re-create the sensation of being at the bottom of a swimming pool and watching light ripple above. “They merged the idea of being underwater with being under the sky,” says Edward Lebow, the director of the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture Public Art Program, which commissioned the piece in collaboration with the Aviation Department Percent-for-Arts program as part of an ongoing $1.5 billion airport-infrastructure project.

To enhance reflective qualities, the designers installed 20 color-changing LED fixtures above the piece and programmed them to match the six shades of blue used for the panels. Each fixture has a dedicated time sequence that varies in color and intensity throughout the day. “The piece always looks different,” says lighting designer Paul Deeb, who used a Color Kinetics playback controller to establish the schedules. “There's never any repetition—though at night, the colors are deeper and more saturated, and, during the day, brighter.” In the evening, four white LED downlights, positioned at the center of the work, evoke the aura of light filtering through water or clouds.

The lowest-hanging aluminum panels, reflective on one side and blue on the other, are loosely bolted to the grid and sway gently in the wind. “You can actually watch the wind move across the piece—like wind moving across water,” says Deeb.

At night, a blue glow permeates the sky beyond the station, visible to passengers arriving on the train. “There is a really lovely purple-blue haze,” says Lebow. “It has a resonance that is kind of surprising.”