Vertigo

Selected to represent the french creative field inside the Paris airport. The studio has been commissioned to design a permanent art installation amongst the new Paris Orly Terminal 3, recently unveiled. This new terminal will host 10 billions of traveller each year. The purpose was to give to each of them a last glimpse of art before their journey. The Artwork, VERTIGO, prepare them to the flight. Vertigo is a unique work, designed only for this terminal and which is part of the desire of Paris airport to radiate the best of French culture.

Vertigo is a polysemous work, initially aesthetic : an aluminium column that evokes the control tower, the turbine, the projection, the takeoff, the rise, a contemplative and enigmatic totem. From outside, the installation deconstruct the busy environment as a strange micro-architecture with a shiny pattern, when you get inside, you experience a new paradigm, you are cut off the terminal, abstracted like in a parenthesis, it is like you are floating for a short time.

Vertigo is a 9-meter-high mirror installation, composed of 150 different size cubes, placed in a certain order that create an ellipse, a kind of twist, that once you are inside, invite your to look up to the sky, and experience a sort of vertigo, like in apesanteur, the purpose of this permanent installation was to evoke a premise to the air travel.

The artwork is a cylinder made of a hidden deck, an aluminium structure that composed each cubes, and stainless steel mirror finish, exclusively polished for the installation. The weight of the structure is 5 tonnes and 3 years of engineering was necessary to match the airport terminal constraints.

Vertigo is not only an art sculpture, but the occasion to give to airport travelers an immersive experience to discover an aerial sensation. The installation makes sens with the airport context: from the client, it is a wish to give to the traveler a last moments off Paris by betting on art, for me, as a designer it is a last moment to discover a moment of surprise and joy inside a retail environment and to finish or start a journey with a memorable vision: get an unreal and abstract aerial sensation.

It is above all a work of experience, Vertigo is an abstracted premise to travel, an out of time and out of place.

Arnaud Lapierre