Where Art Meets Architecture

My Personal Reflections on an Artist's Journey Across Mediums and Disciplines

In 2007, I was privileged to collaborate with the Luxembourg architectural practice Witry & Witry of Echternach on what would become one of the most formative projects of my career — the Dellhéicht school sports hall in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. What followed was not simply the completion of a commission. It was an education.

The Award

The project received the IOC/IAKS Award 2007 — a Gold distinction, jointly awarded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Association for Sports and Leisure Facilities (IAKS). We were one of only four Gold recipients from 88 competing teams across 27 countries. I will not pretend that it was anything other than extraordinary.

My Role as the Artist

The building's above-ground facade was glazed — a decision belonging entirely to the architects and structural engineers. What it presented to me, as the artist, was an opportunity and a very specific artistic challenge: the artwork needed to work in both directions, inward and outward, holding visual interest whether seen from within the building or from the street. My work was the design and realisation of an enveloping net of stainless steel cable mesh on that facade, onto which I introduced a series of hand-designed acrylic glass elements.

Those elements were conceived to represent a living human cell. Two shades of acrylic glass were selected — a matt light green and a fluorescent turquoise — establishing a vibrant, rhythmic relationship with the precisely dimensioned wavy mesh and with the surrounding trees. From the street, the effect reads as something almost organic, even spontaneous. The forms echo the natural environment. But the point of departure was always the human cell: its shape, its vitality, its suggestion of something living and in motion.

The technical demands were considerable. The acrylic glass elements had to withstand full exterior exposure — UV radiation, temperature fluctuation, the full force of the elements — without fading or degrading. Colourfast and UV-resistant materials were therefore not an aesthetic preference but a non-negotiable performative requirement. Every creative decision carried a consequence beyond the visual.

What I Learned

Working at architectural scale demands a discipline that is simply not required of work made for a gallery wall or a studio table. Every creative decision has a structural and performative consequence. The weight of materials, the behaviour of metal under temperature change, the way light moves across a south-facing facade throughout the seasons — these are not peripheral considerations.

This is precisely what working across disciplines offers. The understanding of how material behaves, how scale shifts perception, how structure and surface are never truly separate — these inform everything. The disciplines are not compartments. They are in constant conversation.

Why this project mattered to me

This was a school. The children who move through that building every day encounter art as an unremarkable part of their ordinary lives: not in a museum, not as an event, simply as the place where they are. I hold a deep conviction that children thrive when artistic expression is integrated into their environments, and that exposure to beauty and creative thought at a young age shapes how they navigate the world. To have contributed to that was not a small thing to me.

Twenty Years On

I reflect on this project now, nearly twenty years later, with a particular kind of gratitude. Not only for the Gold award, but for what the project demanded of me as an artist. It asked me to be more than one thing simultaneously. To hold aesthetic vision and material rigour in the same hand. To work in deep collaboration with architects and engineers whose language was not mine, and to find within that the discipline that has since become central to everything I do.

My artistic practice has moved through many mediums — architectural installation, drawing, watercolour, and bronze. Each time I move from one discipline to another, I carry what the others have taught me.

In my next post, I share the journey behind my recent patinated bronze sculptures — from pencil drawings and watercolour, to bronze.