Suspended within the double-height interior spaces adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall, two luminous forms hover in the air, activating as daylight moves through the building. As sunlight filters through the surrounding glass walls, color scatters across the interior, casting shifting patterns across floors, walls, and passing bodies.

Commissioned for the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love, Ventricle is a gravity-formed pair of hanging structures installed within the interior of the Southbank Centre. Each lightweight aluminum structure is composed of intertwined tubes woven into an open, net-like geometry. Clad in 3M’s Solar Mirror Film, the surfaces refract and redirect incoming light, transforming it as it passes through the structure.

The film—typically used to intensify sunlight on photovoltaic panels—is repurposed here to amplify and colorize daylight entering through the adjacent glass walls. As light moves through the woven geometry, it produces a shifting landscape of color that changes with time, weather, and movement, defining the experience through atmosphere rather than object.

The geometry of each form is developed through form-finding software, allowing the structures to settle into shapes optimized for gravity and tension. Thousands of uniquely laser-cut aluminum components are riveted together to form a continuous structural net. The solar reflective film redirects the spectrum of light at varying angles, producing subtle shifts in color and intensity throughout the day.

Together, the two suspended forms operate as a reflection on interdependence and connection. Like a woven fabric made from many individual strands, Ventricle suggests that richness and vibrancy emerge through collective structure—an expression of how difference, when intertwined, can produce something greater than any single element alone.

Photos: Alan Tansey

Find out more about the process:
Form finding
Complex surface fabrication
Photos of the installation