Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) and American artist Phillip K. Smith III have collaborated to create a site-specific installation that literally mirrors life.
Commissioned by art collector Dallas Price and her husband, sculptor Bob Van Breda, Santa Monica Linear is a horizontal line of reflected sky inserted into a 110-foot vertical plane of lush, green landscape on the grounds of the couple’s home. Smith enlisted the help of SOM’s structural engineers in order to craft a perfectly level, extruded form, free from internal structural elements.
The resulting sculpture is a 30-foot-long, ultra-flat aluminum beam element, featuring a mirrored glass surface that sits on a 42-degree slope. Its positioning avoided the use of trucks and cranes, so it was installed by hand. The piece appears as a rectangle from one perspective, however, it is actually triangular.
By day, Santa Monica Linear narrowly reflects the sky and surrounding greenery. At night, internal LEDs create slowly shifting gradients of light across its surface that blend with the reflection, echoing the environment’s sunset. The colors appear to float amidst the darkness.
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