MSK Lobby Wall

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
New York, NY
Completed 2013

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.

Type

Object

Credits

Client: Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Art advisor:  Nancy Rosen
Building architect:  Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
Project team:  Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David J. Lewis; Jason Dannenbring, project manager; Alex Terzich, project manager; Matthew Roman
Fabricator:  Veyko
Photography: Michael Moran

Publications

Berman, Ila and Douglas Burnham. "Memorial Sloan Kettering Wall." Expanded Field. 2015
Kristal, Marc. "What's Your Perspective?" Interior Design. September 2013.