La Congiuntura, 2017 – Olafur Eliasson x Einar Thorsteinn

La congiuntura del tempo (Tempo junction) is Olafur Eliasson's 2017 work for the Agnelli Foundation in Turin. It fills the window between the Foundation's two buildings. Visible from both sides, it becomes a multi-storey kaleidoscopic installation. The window is built up from stackable modules based in the golden ratio, developed by Eliasson with his long-time collaborator Einar Thorsteinn. Each module is a stainless-steel frame carrying glass panes and mirrors: clear and coloured glass, mirror, gold, and colour-effect filter glass, which reflects one colour while letting its complement pass through. Stacked to fill the opening, the modules still allow glimpses into the spaces beyond, and daylight and lamplight throw coloured speckles and tinted shadows around the room.

Research:
Each module comes from a SuperCube construction: two identical cubes are rotated along a shared diagonal until their edges divide in the golden ratio, and the lines where the faces meet leave a polyhedron of twelve triangular faces, a geometry that traces back to work begun by Buckminster Fuller. In the SuperCube system this piece is the architectural case, a window intervention that changes how a space is perceived while holding the modules' interlocking logic.