This post is the fourth in a series about Sky Portal in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Sky Portal was a great experience all around, but there were definitely challenges.

I think the fiber was the first major change, adding the fiber. [see part 3 in this series]  And then the next thing–I had originally envisioned the steel cylinder just floating with nothing underneath it.  Just floating, solely by 24 cables.  But then structural engineering came around and said, well, it’s really not going to work because of the wind.  There’s nothing holding it to the ground so it can flop around and harmonics can start happening, so we have to tether it somehow. 

And that just killed me at first, because I thought the whole thing was really predicated on pure floating.  But things being what they were, I was forced to come up with a solution.  And it really turned out well. It actually helped. I went back to the balloon and looked at the balloon and the way the gondola was attached to the balloon and just kind of went off of that.  So I came up with four posts that come out of the circular bench, and then there are some cables that splay up and hold the whole thing down.  But what it does is it makes it more balloon-like, and it also kind of completes the space.  You feel a little more part of the space, it defines the space.  So that was interesting.

Albuquerque, public art, sky portal