jiyeon song: “one day poem pavillion”.

How much do I love this? Let me count the ways…

Proof yet again that the most elemental concepts, envisioned in a different way, can have the most dramatic results. We’ve got words. We’ve got sunlight. We’ve got shadow. And Jiyeon Song has combined them into a breath-taking piece of public art.

Through a matrix of perforations, sunshine gets converted through the dome into lines of poetry underneath. For the text, Song chose classical Korean poems called “Sijos” and translated them into English. It takes about 8 hours to see the entire poem, with each line visible for about an hour. The design actually shifts poems based on the season (how they managed to get it to do that with only one set of holes in the top, I have no idea…). During the summer the poem focuses on a theme of “new life”, during the winter it turns to “reflection and the passing of time”. The time-lapse video showing the the delicacy of the words moving through the shadow of the dome is a must see.

On Song’s thesis site you can check out some incredibly detailed info on the project, from experiments and calculations on how the project would work to some amazing drawings from its developmental phase, like the chart below showing which words would be visible during which phases of the day…

Via draw.kyu via NOTCOT