Category Architecture, Art

Kaleidome is a public art installation by LAAB at a local town park in Hong Kong.

Kaleidome reflects a blossom of light-and-shadow interplay, offering constantly changing moments that captivate the souls of urban strollers. In this public artwork, viewers are also creators. Together, they make various compositions of color-tinted reflections that transform the empty plaza into a flourished garden.

Kaleidome is composed of 242 polyhedral cells of polished-stainless-steel mirror. Each reflective cell is a small window that frames the environment and multiples the vista. Like a kaleidoscope, it shuffles the images of river, trees, buildings, passers-by and flowers in the air, and tints the concrete plaza into a flourished place.

Looking at the oculus, you will discover a network of veins composed of ultra-thin, almost invisible polygon profiles, visually juxtaposing the tree branches in the sky. The cells packed in a curvilinear form also produce a dynamic visual effect, as they oscillate between opaque and transparent in viewers’ eyes.

The project crosses the boundary between art and architecture. Pushing against the limit of height, area and budget, our team maximized the volume in a dome structure with minimum material consumption. Every edge or corner was carefully polished to ensure that it is kid-friendly.

Use of Technology

The 242 polyhedral cells are made of polished-stainless-steel mirror in 22 shapes. Each mirror was laser-cut and folded according to our parametric computer model. The cell is tinted in various shades of red and blue with a very thin layer of paint that preserves the reflectiveness of the original mirror finish. Not only did the parametric model streamline the design and fabrication process, but it also minimized the amount of materials on dome construction.

Mathematically speaking, Kaleidome is ‘Voronoi tessellation’ – a partitioning of the semi-spherical surface – into regions based on distance to points in a specific subset of the plane. In other words, it is a geometric diagram computed by taking pairs of ‘center points’ that are close together and drawing a line that is equidistant between them and perpendicular to the line connecting them. All points on the lines are equidistant to the nearest two or more source points.

漫花叢是LAAB為香港沙田市鎮公園設計的公共藝術裝置。我們應用Voronoi tessellation技術計算，用22種不同的形狀，重復製作成242件多邊形的不銹鋼鏡面結構。我們首先在電腦製作3-D 模型，然後把鏡面用激光切割和折疊的手法製作出不同的形狀，再在鏡面塗上薄薄的油漆層來保留原來鏡面的反射性。在陽光照射下，漫花叢會折射岀千變萬化的光線和影像。它就像一個绽放的紙花球，吸引着廣場中絡繹不絕的遊人。徘迴時，遊人會看到自己的投影，成為漫花叢的一部分。人動，影像也隨之起舞。在絢麗多變的光影折射下，漫花叢為沙田公園一片空曠的廣場帶來截然不同的視覺震撼。