Atrium Sculpture for a Transit Interchange
Metropolitan transit authority · Copenhagen, Denmark · 304 Stainless
A suspended piece in the atrium of an interchange where commuters pass twice a day and the building never closes. The sculpture is above head height, seen from directly below, and inaccessible without a platform.
The brief
Humanise a hard, high-volume concourse without obstructing the movement flows the station is designed around. No floor footprint was available — the piece had to hang.
Design approach
A ring of curved plates rotating around a void, so the composition reads as one form from the concourse floor and stays legible when only part of it is visible through the escalator void. Deliberately open, so it never reads as a solid mass hanging over people.
Material & engineering
304 stainless for an indoor, controlled environment — 316 would buy nothing here and cost more. Suspension is carried by three 12 mm stainless rods to a steel frame cast into the roof slab, with a calculated dead load of 640 kg and a service load for one maintenance technician.
Primary structure was verified for a seismic case as well as static load, and every connection is a mechanical fixing so nothing depends on a weld in tension.
Fabrication & finish
Bead-blasted externally to break up the reflections of the concourse lighting, satin internally so the void reads darker than the shell. Bead blasting was chosen over brushing specifically because it does not show fingerprints — a real consideration at 9 m above a public floor.
Installation
Pre-assembled on the concourse floor under a night possession, then hoisted in one lift and levelled on the rod turnbuckles. The whole operation, including rigging setup, took six hours inside the closure window.
Outcome & value
The authority chose a design that can be cleaned from a single scissor-lift position, which removed the need for a permanent access cradle in the roof design — a saving that covered a meaningful share of the sculpture’s cost.
