Project Completion
2017
Project Team
Samantha Brown
Rachel Burch
Marija Draskic
Daniel Ho
Yigang Li
Gregory Smolkovich
Ellie Sonnenwirth Weisz
Michael Zhou
Faculty Advisors
Jason Foster Butz
Lavender Tessmer
Partners
St. Louis Lambert International Airport
Lambert Art & Culture Program
Regional Arts Commission
CannonDesign
Frequented by more than 7 million passengers per year, Terminal 2 of St. Louis Lambert International Airport provided a prominent space for design intervention. The airport sought to exhibit an installation for the space to engage with topics of local identity, public space, and the experience of air travel.
In 2017, seven of my peers and I were selected to engage with a team of stakeholders in St. Louis to propose a design for an art installation that we could feasibly model, fabricate, assemble and install within a five-month schedule. From January to June of that year, Spectroplexus was born.
Spectroplexus reacts to the site with the idea of “confluence,” addressing both the geographical context of St. Louis and the constant current of diverse passengers through the airport. The terminal itself is a unique space that exhibits various hybrid identities, such as organic movement versus rigid configurations of people, as well as the artificial mechanisms of flight that resemble the biological organisms after which they were modeled. The title Spectroplexus reflects these concepts through a gradating array of geometric surfaces and the intricate armature on which it is suspended.
