From the outside, hospitals look like bricks and mortar.
Standard building.
But inside the emotion for both our staff
and the patients, it's just incredible.
We hope that this artwork will provide a moment of reflection, a moment of hope,
a moment of respite in a really tough day
when you can see something beautiful, get recharged and get back into the fight.
I wanted to do something that would be wondrous.
And also, that would be very life-affirming.
It looks great.
Oh my God. Yup. Install team...
The name is called "Decoding the Tree of Life".
Partly because I was inspired by both DNA
and a tree of life, it kind of combined the two.
And I also think what science does
is we're trying to understand
and unlock these incredibly complex codes.
We're very excited to be a part of this.
-There's something super unique. -There's something really different about this.
It's something very unique about this work
and looking at the nuance of
how everything fits together, but also having moments, like stepping back
and being like...wow! This thing is 40 feet tall!
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Something in me just was drawn
to doing something that would have height.
I was exploring both the shape of
the Schuylkill River, as well as a tree,
and the drawings I started exploring became sort of a tree of life.
And it's also if you think about when DNA was discovered and invented,
we've been on an incredible scientific journey
and it is exploring and trying to understand more
about the basic foundations of life on this planet.
I just wanted to do something
that was in that larger conversation with what, in a way, they do here
on the, obviously, scientific end.
But wanted to be in dialogue with that.
There was an incredible process
trying to figure out how are we going to bring this up to scale
and capture kind of the jewel-like quality of the original models?
Unlike many of the works I've done, we invented this
the fabricators, the installers, everyone helped make this a reality.
So Maya developed a maquette with her team in her studio, brought that to us,
and then we 3-D scanned that maquette and built a replica at a larger scale
using augmented reality and then put on augmented reality
goggles and adjust the maquette to adapt to the digital model.
Right now, you can see all of these individual castings,
and we're able to use the AR to put it together
with precision and have it flow together seamlessly.
There are a variety of glass spheres in different dimensions
that have been all hand-blown, and the clear glass get composed
onto garlands of aircraft cable that get draped
and wrapped around the tree's main steel organic form.
You think about the human body
and then the veins under our skin, in a weird way,
this has that sort of absolute depth as well as there is added
to that the imagery of kind of a tree.
So, is it a living thing?
Is it something out of the plant world or is it really something coming out of us?
And I think that's sort of the ambiguity of the piece.
The honor and privilege of working with Maya Lin
and seeing her mind work, her early models, and then seeing the real product
is just inspirational to me.
And I think decades from now, people are still going to be talking about
Maya Lin's sculpture in the Pavilion.
When it's that close to what you've envisioned, it's pretty remarkable.
To me it's like a sense of wonder if I look at something in the natural world,
and I wanted definitely to capture that sense of wonder in this piece.