The Shooting Star sculpture at London Design Festival 2015

During London Design Festival 2015, british sculptor Alex Chinneck transforms the everyday into the extraordinary with his latest outdoor installation, ‘a bullet from a shooting star’. The enormous intervention sees a lattice of steel that takes the form of an inverted electricity pylon, seemingly shot into the ground at a precarious angle. In its realization, Alex Chinnek and his team used 450 pieces of steel and 900 engineered connection points, all constructed from a combined length of 1186 meters of steel, weighing 15 tons.

The 35-metre high creative structure has been designed to be seen from a distance, and can be viewed from North Greenwich Station, the Emirates Airline cable car, the Thames Clipper service, Canary Wharf and all planes that fly to and from City Airport. Illuminated at night, the work acts as a literal beacon and will project a maze of latticed shadows.

This massive box steel sculpture was commissioned by the London Design Festival in collaboration with Greenwich Peninsula. Alex Chinnec, who specialises in architectural installations featuring optical illusions, was also the artist behind a house in Margate with a slumping brick facade and a levitating building in Covent Garden’s Piazza.

Alex Chinneck’s indoor and outdoor works have been conceived to share a dialogue that links the East and the West of the Peninsula. Physically separated yet sculpturally connected they will encourage visitors to explore both areas of the expansive and extraordinary district and unravel its rich history.

Illuminated at night, it will also create a beacon for passing cars and for planes passing overhead on their arrival to and from the City Airport, as well as the Emirates cable car that links both banks of the River Thames and passing boat services.

“The work takes a complex path to reach a dramatic conclusion,” says Alex Chinneck. “For the London Design Festival I wanted to take on my biggest challenge to date – one that could only be realised through collaborative design and problem solving.”