At the Centro site, we imagined the public art enhancing the landscape's role as a refuge from the heavy traffic interchange of Columbia Pike and George Mason Drive. The lush meadow-like plantings and circular seating areas adjacent encourage users to pause along the path. We saw an opportunity to strengthen this invitation by creating a vertical point of interest within the low-level plantings and providing shade and enclosure at the seating area
Phantom Formwork is a wire mesh cube carved with a subtracted tubular void creating a place of inhabitation. Its geometries are loosely inspired by the architectural language of the transit infrastructure linking Arlington to the Capitol. The forms associated with subterranean concrete are recontextualized in a lush garden setting as a ghostly white mesh that offset the colorful lush garden that surrounds it.
