In March 2020, Jason Krugman Studio created its largest sculpture to date, a 22ft x 22ft x 16ft centerpiece for Capella Tower in Minneapolis, MN. Inspired by the "wiring" of organic creatures, Jason Krugman's Capella Basket sculpture uses a new electrical medium to rout energy through space. The sculpture is a centerpiece for Capella Tower, a class A office tower in downtown Minneapolis. From its hang-point 70-ft in the air, the artwork floats centrally in the large glass-walled atrium. Viewers are able to get a 270 degree view from the mezzanine and peer straight up and through from the floor below.

Capella Basket is based on Krugman's original table-sized Basket sculpture. Its form references the toroidal shape of magnetic fields. Krugman used his patented connector system to create the sculpture with almost no wiring. Instead, over 10,000 circuit boards distribute and deliver power to 1,860 LED light sources. Blending craft with technology, Krugman works to discover new ways of arranging electricity in three dimensions.

PROCESS

The sculpture is made from an electrified mesh of over 10,000 circuit boards supported by an aluminum frame. During construction, the sculpture was first set up in its entirety in a Brooklyn warehouse. After 8 weeks of assembly and fabrication, it was disassembled, rolled up and driven to Minneapolis. The below timelapses highlight the process as well as the final assembly and testing on site at Capella Tower.

To recreate the original artwork at a more than 10x scale, the process morphs from a physical exploration of handmade form into a digital design and fabrication exercise. The original sculpture was made with a series of systematic operations to transform a flat sheet of hand-soldered LED mesh into a 3-dimensional toroidal section. These operations are replicated digitally with key parameters of the original physical model programmed into the digital one. The initial constraints during the artwork's creation make it agnostic of scale or even medium.