Cubehenge is a full-scale, interactive reinterpretation of Stonehenge, built in light. It stood at the centre of Glastonbury Festival’s Dance Village — now Silver Hayes — as both an installation people could walk into and a working stage.
Building a henge from IBC containers
The idea was simple to describe and hard to build: a full-scale illuminated Stonehenge that dancers could move through, not just look at. Translating that into physical reality took most of a year. The piece was conceived in the autumn of 2009 with Glastonbury in mind, and debuted the following June.
The building block turned out to be the IBC — the 1,000-litre container normally used to move liquids. It was the right size, it stacked, and it was fully recyclable, which mattered given where it was going. 116 of them were arranged in the plan of the henge, stacked up to 6m (19.6ft) at the tallest point, across a circle 40m in diameter.
Lighting 116 cubes individually
Each cube was lit from the inside and addressed individually over DMX, so the whole circle could be treated as one instrument rather than a set of separate objects.
Finding the right fitting was the hard part: it had to be compact enough to sit inside a cube, yet powerful enough to fill a frosted 1,000-litre container. Months of testing ruled out unit after unit before the Visage Multipar 375, sourced through Batmink, proved it could do both. Control ran on ChamSys MagicQ with a Mini Wing. LED was chosen deliberately for its low power draw — an installation of this size lit conventionally would have been a very different proposition on a festival’s generators.
An installation that was also a stage
Because the cubes were sound-to-light capable, the circle responded to whatever was playing across it. Cubehenge hosted The Orb (live), Zero 7, Norman Jay, Will Saul, A Skillz, Kissy Sell Out, Alex Metric, Dirty Phonics and Ashley Beedle.
On the evening of the summer solstice, days before the festival officially opened, it became the gathering point for crew and traders on site. That was never designed for, and it is the part we are proudest of.
Cubehenge at Glastonbury, 2010–2015
Cubehenge debuted in 2010 and returned in full in 2011. In later years it was reconfigured to suit the changing site layout, and Cubehenge monuments stood at Glastonbury until 2015.
The modular principle it proved — a repeatable illuminated unit that can be arranged into almost any form — is the basis of most of what Terraform has built since.
