Words and photographs by Claire L. Evans.
This is the Triforium.
A “polyphonoptic” sculpture, whose original design included 1,494 multicolored glass prisms lighting up in synchrony to music from a 79-note glass bell carillon, the Triforium is a six-story, 60-ton public artwork in Downtown Los Angeles. Like a lot of public art, it’s easy to ignore—especially in a city where people primarily get around in cars. But the Triforium is special.
For one, it was decades ahead of his time. Joseph Young, the artist who created the Triforium, imagined that the sculpture would someday become the “the Rosetta Stone of art and technology,” using motion sensors and a computer-controlled system to detect and translate the motions of pedestrians in the nearby LA Mall into patterns of light and sound displayed by the prisms and and the carillon, at the time the largest instrument of its kind in the world. Interactive art of this scale and ambition simply didn’t exist in 1975, and the technology available to Young was limited. Even with a budget of nearly a million dollars, the Triforium was unable to live up to Young’s vision.
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The Triforium has fallen into disrepair. Its incandescent bulbs have pretty much burned out. The famous glass bell carillon was removed from the sculpture with bolt cutters in 2006, although it hadn’t been operational for decades. Pigeons roost in the sculpture’s heights. The incandescent bulbs have burned out nearly completely, twice. And the LA Mall, once designed to be a hub of pedestrian traffic in Los Angeles, is a ghost town—only a few businesses remain open, and apart from the office workers criss-crossing the plaza at the lunch hour, the plaza surrounding the Triforium is mostly empty. But still the Triforium stands, waiting for a second chance.
That’s where we come in—we’ve started The Triforium Project, a coalition of artists, urban planners, civic leaders, and LA enthusiasts who believe that Joseph Young’s vision for an interactive light and sound sculpture should be executed properly. Forty years after its dedication, we have access to technology Young couldn’t even have imagined: cheap, nimble computer systems, long-lasting LED bulbs, and the capacity to take interaction to a totally new level with web applications.
Above all, we want to reframe the sculpture’s role in the city. No longer a misremembered public arts failure, a forgotten experiment, an eyesore, a political millstone—but a beacon for the arts in Los Angles. It stands in the center of a changing city, a city full of creative people and in the midst of a technological sea change. All it needs is a little light.
