Containers was a walk-through illuminated installation made for the opening of the Westquay entertainment centre in Southampton, and shown as part of the city’s first Festival of Light in February 2017.
A dockside language
The forms reference the working waterfront: arches, tunnels, industrial shapes, yellow zone markings and echoes of dockside cranes.
Southampton is a port before it is anything else, and the vocabulary was drawn from the working parts of it rather than from the picturesque ones. Visitors moved through the piece as its multi-coloured LEDs shifted, so the atmosphere changed around them as they walked.
Walk-through, not look-at
The commission asked for something the public would enter rather than photograph from a distance.
That changes the design problem. A piece meant to be walked through has to work at arm’s length as well as across a plaza — the detail has to hold up close, the route through has to be legible, and there has to be a reason to stop once you are inside it.
Scale against a new building
The hardest constraint was scale. The installation had to be large enough not to be lost against a brand-new entertainment centre, while staying intimate enough that people wanted to step in and spend time.
Too small and it reads as decoration in front of a building; too large and it becomes a barrier. 34 cubes, at the size and spacing we settled on, sat in between.
Containers was featured in the Daily Telegraph.
