“It’s almost like you’ve taken the whole sky and folded it in,” said James Carpenter, the designer of the “Sky Reflector-Net” at the Fulton Center, under construction at Broadway and Fulton Street.
“It’s almost like you’ve taken the whole sky and folded it in,” said James Carpenter, the designer of the “Sky Reflector-Net” at the Fulton Center, under construction at Broadway and Fulton Street.

The James Carpenter’s Sky-Reflector Net, erected 2013, within the dome of New York’s Fulton Street Transit Center,  has its hourglass hyperbolic shaped roots in the famous Moscow Shukhov Tower, erected in 1920. The 525 foot high Shukov Tower was originally conceived as a 350m (1,148’) radio tower tall enough to reach far off Soviet Territories. Due to WW1 blockades, shortages of materials, and Stalin’s antipathy for the Avant-Garde, it was never completed to its intended height.

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In fact, the Sky-reflector net was commissioned as an art piece – part of the Arts for Transit requirement to delegate a percentage of the budget to public art. In this case, about $2.1M, the largest work ever commissioned by that agency. According to my estimates,the installation came in about 25% under budget.

Like the Shukhov Tower, the work also serves a function, albeit less ambitious: its diamond shaped aluminum facets deflect sunlight down into the pavilion from (manually) adjustable reflectors just below the oculus, above. At all of 79 feet in height, the piece is not audacious in height, yet it seems more so when one looks up from the concourse below..