Flatiron Reflection is an outdoor public art installation commissioned for a public plaza on 23rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. One of our inspirations was the famous Edward Steichen photo from 1904 that shows the Flatiron Building on a misty night seen through the trees of Madison Square Park.

In the photo, the building appears mysterious and Manhattan seems momentarily calm. It’s a quality of the atmosphere and the framing of the photo that produce those feelings and we wanted to reproduce those effects in a physical structure.

The form of the installation does that by making an interior room that cuts down on the visual noise of the street, isolating the skyline and the Flatiron building which is just south of the installation from the traffic and commotion of the city.

The other important element was the desire to create blurred reflections using a material treatment covering all of the surfaces. It’s a temporary installation and we wanted to embrace that by using paper tubes as the main structure.

Once we started looking into what had been done with tubes in the past and what possibilities existed, we got interested in wrapping the tubes with layers of mirrored paper or film.

We talked to tube companies who suggested a number of paper manufacturers. We needed something that would bind to the tubes and yet have the reflective properties we were looking for on the surface.

A lot of companies couldn’t meet the requirements, but Hampden Papers turned into a great partner. They had a productthat worked for us—a paper laminated mylar with options for the backing thickness andsurface clarity—and they were very easy to work with.

Caraustar, the company who made the tubes, including applying the reflective inner and outer layers using Hampden’s paper, used water-resistant adhesives and allowed us to design the overlaps at the critical seams to achieve the quality and durability we needed.

Our fabrication partners, The New Motor in Brooklyn, cut the tubes and assembled them into final form on thesite. The process of customizing at the manufacturing stage and then crafting the “raw” partslocally where we could be in direct contact with the team doing the assembly was critical to thesuccess of the project.

The installation surprised everyone in terms of its scale and the effect that it has in that location. The quality of the central space where the reflections and enclosure come together, and the way the surface catches light and seems to change color at night as car lights and traffic signals play off the mylar turned out to be quite amazing.

CREDITS: Architect: Future Expansion  Engineering: GMS Fabrication: The New Motor  Custom Paper Tubes: Caraustar Reflective  Paper: Hampden Papers  Client: Flatiron / 23rd Street Partnership and Van Alen Institute  Photographs: Noah Kalina and Jon Macapodi