Field of Light

If you happen to be around Cornwall, England this winter you should visit The Eden Project. It's a building complex featuring marvelous architecture but as it happens to be the project isn't about architecture at all. No, it's a place where biomes were recreated. So there's a tropical rain forest building you can visit where they tried to recreate a rain forest. The underlying message is to show what we, humanity, can achieve with a positive attitude towards doing things on behalf of the environment. It's a very exciting venue and if you happen to visit it, please let us know.

But this post isn't about The Eden Project. This post is about a project that is hosted at The Eden Project; Field Of Light by Bruce Munro, who designs "creative lighting solutions". The Field Of Light is placed at the roof of the visitor's center which happens to be covered with grass. It, in fact, really is a 'field of light', created by 6000 acrylic tubes covered with a glass bulb and filled with optic fibers. All the tubes are placed on an area that measures 60 x 20 meters and the total amount of optic fiber cable that was used equals 24 kilometers (approximately 14.9 miles). It looks like this.


It should be noted that this photograph was taken from way up above. But how does the project work? As you can see in the picture it looks like there are certain networks of colors. In the center of every 'network' Munro placed a projector that projects light at the ends of the optic fiber cables. Those cables 'carry' the light through themselves (that's the excellent characteristic of optic fiber cable) and end up in the bulbs. This is what Field of Light looks like from up close.


Funny enough Munro got his idea while he was driving in the Australian desert. As he says himself:

The field of light was originally conceived fifteen years ago during a trip through central Australia. The red desert had an incredible feeling of energy; ideas seemed to radiate from it along with the heat.

Field of Light is on display at The Eden Project until spring 2009.

-jdh