The Sun installation

Where is the sun?

On a cloudy day we ask where the sun has gone. It has not gone anywhere — it is behind the clouds, behind the next building, melting into the horizon. Spending our days indoors, we lose touch with it, lose track of the time of day, and throw our own body clock off balance.

The Sun was our answer: an installation that shows exactly where the sun is, right now, even when you cannot see it.

The idea

A lit sphere, 80 cm across, travels along a 16-metre arched pipe, driven by a motor, from the point where the sun rises to the point where it sets. It does not imitate the sun’s path; it follows it. The position is calculated for the real location and the real date, so the sphere is always where the sun is.

It was designed for the glass dome of BlueCity, the former Tropicana swimming pool on the Maas in Rotterdam — a building already made for watching the sky. People would sit together under it and watch the day go by: no matter where we are from, we are all under the same sun.

Getting it right before building it

The dome was modelled in Rhino and lit in Twinmotion, so we could check the trajectory against the real structure — where the arch could hang, what it would cross, how the sphere would read from below at every hour.

The motion system was prototyped at 1:10 scale at Protobureau in Rotterdam: a two-metre arch and a small transparent sphere, to find the problems in the mechanism and the materials before committing to sixteen metres of pipe over people’s heads.

More than an object

The plan was a week around the autumn equinox, from 23 September to 2 October 2022: turning the sun on at sunrise, yoga under it in the morning, lectures on the sun and how we measure it, solar telescopes, concerts and a party in the evening.

Where it stands

The Sun was never built. The knock-on effects of the Covid years — on funding, venues and everyone’s plans — caught up with it. The design, the calculations and the prototype are all there, and it remains one of the ideas we would most like to see made. If you have a space with a view of the sky, talk to us.