LIGO’s Wave Wall Wins Design Award

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Science Education Center in Livingston, Louisiana, has won a 2007 New Orleans Design Award from the New Orleans chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The Science Education Center was one of 12 winners chosen from over 70 submissions, which is more entries than the chapter has received in any previous year. The award, in the category of “Divine Detail,” cited “form and function coming together in an exciting and unexpected way” in the design of the building and its dynamic exterior Wave Wall.

Visitors walk into the center under the wall, which is a kinetic wind sculpture consisting of 120 27-foot-long pendulums strung across the entire 85-foot length of the building’s façade. Wave Wall is activated either by wind or by energetic LIGO guests, who can initiate the wave’s motion and propagation via ropes and pulleys. In response, the massive aluminum masts swinging just overhead may trace graceful undulating patterns, or they may break into a chaotic dance with a gust of wind.

Nationally renowned architects Eskew + Dumez + Ripple of New Orleans designed the LIGO Science Education Center, which officially opened in November 2006. Wave Wall, commissioned by the U.S. National Science Foundation, was designed by a team of artists that included Shawn Lani, Charles Sowers, and Peter Richards, along with Thomas Humphrey and Susan Schwartzenberg of the San Francisco Exploratorium. They collaborated with scientists and engineers from the LIGO Laboratory, Caltech, High Precision Devices of Boulder, Colorado, and Superior Steel of Baton Rouge.

Fully operational since 2001, LIGO is a scientific facility designed and managed by Caltech and MIT for detecting astrophysical gravitational waves. To visit the LIGO Science Education Center online, go here. Wave Wall is even on YouTube—check out here. —DW-H