Architecture studio Brut Deluxe has designed this year's Christmas lights in Madrid to work like a "flip book on an urban scale", taking spectators on a trip to the moon as they walk through the city.
Instead of creating a repeating motif, Madrid and Munich-based Brut Deluxe has designed a sequence of 31 lit images representing a trip to the moon.
Photography is by Miguel de Guzmán.
MOON. Christmas Lights Gran Via Madrid 2014-2015 from ImagenSubliminal on Vimeo.
The perception of the lights changes
along the route, meaning that taking the time to walk its entire length
is the only way to experience the installation in full.
Banners
of gridded blue lights strung high above the street feature a white
cratered moon design in the centre, which becomes larger and appears to
get gradually closer to Christmas shoppers strolling beneath.
"Instead
of flipping through pages with your thumb to produce a primitive
cinematographic illusion of motion or animated pictures, with Moon it is
the spectator that creates this effect by moving himself along the
street," said head of Brut Deluxe, Ben Busche.
The
site-specific installation responds to the topography of Madrid's Gran
Via. The thoroughfare rises at Plaza España and the crossing with Alcala
Street, with its most elevated point located at half way – between the
Telefonica Building and Plaza Callao.
"The
sequence of light motifs produces an effect of arrival or zooming in to
the moon, coinciding with the rise of the street, and inversely, of
departure or zooming out with the descent," said Busche.
The
installation will be in place until 6 January 2015 – the "twelfth
night" – when Christmas decorations are traditionally taken down.
Each
year Madrid's city council commissions a different designer or
architect to create festive street lighting. In 2012, Italian
architect Teresa Sapey created glittering circles of LEDs for the
Spanish capital.
from dezeen