Every year the students of King’s College, Cambridge run their own graduation ball — organised, curated and coordinated entirely by them. For the 2015 ball, whose theme was Glitch, Terraform was asked for an IBC LED installation with scale, impact and a focal point worth photographing.
Building on a listed site
King’s College is a listed site, and the courtyard is not somewhere you can simply put a structure down.
The brief carried a constraint most festival work does not: real weight restrictions, and a surface that could not be marked or damaged. Whatever we built had to have a small footprint and leave no trace at all.
Erected by hand
The answer was a self-supporting structure that could be put up entirely by hand, with no forklift.
That single decision resolved most of the problem. No plant on the courtyard meant no point loading from wheels or outriggers, no fuel or hydraulics near a historic surface, and no vehicle access needed through the college. It also meant a small crew could build it quietly, on a site still in use.
Against the Chapel
The installation cycled through pre-programmed colours and effects through the night, with King’s College Chapel behind it.
That backdrop does most of the work, and it also sets the limit: anything too aggressive would have looked like it was competing with one of the great buildings in England. 20 cubes, sequenced slowly, sat comfortably in front of it.
It remains one of the more unusual sites we have built on, and one of the most enjoyable.
