A 70m long ‘River of Air’ artwork comprised of 18,660 suspended blue and silver leaves that create air currents, permanently displayed above Maison Blanche metro station.
The River of Air by artist Ned Kahn emulates the movement of air through thousands of individual leaf structures. The work of art is a monumental sculpture made up of four pylons and a flexible horizontal cable net, from which thousands (18660) of individual leaves are suspended. The gentle movement of these leaves creates optical currents that visualise the movement of the air.
It is one in a series of works by the artist on the same theme. The piece at Maison Blanche station stands out for its size and horizontal orientation. The installation will remain permanently above the underground entrance to the metro station.
Eckersley O’Callaghan was involved in the structural design of the masts, their anchoring in the new concrete slab of the metro station and the cable net. The cable span on the ground is approximately 70m x 6m which passes over the aediculae and stairwells which serve as the stations exits.
The scale of the work, the large deformation and the nonlinear behaviour of the cable net required modelling with great precision, resulting in a 40,000+ element model. To identify the convergence scheme, many smaller models were created and tested in an iterative approach. A series of assumptions have been made to estimate the effects of the wind on the leaves, both locally and globally. The use of small mock-ups enabled us to confirm these assumptions.
© Eckersley O’Callaghan 2024
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