Danielle Berrin reports (there’s video of her lovely self):
Longtime collaborators architect Moshe Safdie and artist Ned Kahn were busy designing the new headquarters for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Washington D.C. when Safdie invited Kahn to "think about rainbows." Standing in a courtyard, staring into a design he describes as a reflecting pool, Kahn’s first thoughts were of water. Then came the flood — ice melting, rising sea levels, global warming; then artwork bridging man and nature; and the image of someone standing on a cliff becoming engulfed by a wave.
All he had to do was figure out how to break water into the perfect-sized droplets to create a rainbow. And then he did.
Just beyond the new Noah’s Ark installation at the Skirball Cultural Center, where Asian elephants and Boringo giraffes tower, a lushly landscaped courtyard has been designed as a rainbow arbor.
Rising from a base of rocks, Kahn’s rainbow is a curved metal form that wraps around a walkway, spraying droplets of mist that coalesce to form a rainbow. It is the marriage of a museum exhibit and a symbolic natural oasis, recalling both the benevolent and destructive elements of nature and symbolizing God’s promise to Noah not to flood the earth again.
To prepare for the arbor’s construction, Kahn studied many versions of the Noah story: "I remember being struck by how many different cultures had references to a flood, the way flood stories seem like part of the collective memory of humankind."
