Standing Wave

Fleet Street, National Harbor, Maryland

When a wave meets its own reflection, the two combine into a wave that appears not to move. Physicists call it a standing wave. upLIGHT built one out of light on Fleet Street at National Harbor, and it runs the length of a city block.

The Peterson Companies wanted to draw the National Harbor waterfront into the heart of the community. upLIGHT worked through the idea in collaboration with the developers in a series of workshops, examining a range of strategies and forms together before settling on this one. The sculpture is made of LED nodes suspended within grids of nearly transparent wire mesh with each rising to an elevated center point. This creates the sensation that the animated points of light hang in the air and flow in stationary waves. Mockups and research showed that this simple combination of mesh and individually controlled pixels would produce the effect, which gave the client the confidence to build it at the scale of a city block.

upLIGHT’s contribution

upLIGHT conceived Standing Wave and carried it through design, mockups, media creation, installation, and programming. The partnership continues today. Standing Wave has been running since 2018, and under an ongoing contract our network operations center monitors the health of the system remotely, so problems are found and fixed before the public notices them.