A designer’s encounter with Plastique Fantastique’s golden installation for Bvlgari on New York’s High Line.
I’ve walked the High Line for years, beginning when its first section opened on June 9, 2009. It’s been part of my life throughout my daughter’s growing-up years—a familiar path woven into our experience of New York.
There may have been posted visiting hours, but back then, in our experience, no one was enforcing them. My daughter and I would be up there at 11:30 at night in the middle of a snowstorm, enjoying the silence and the beauty. Snow transforming that elevated stretch of the city, giving a familiar place an entirely different presence.
You come to know a place through those experiences. Its turns, its views, its rhythms. It becomes part of your own story.
Then suddenly, BOOM.
A friend and I walked over to see auruBOROS, Plastique Fantastique’s golden inflatable sculpture for Bvlgari, tucked beneath the Standard Hotel on the High Line. The hotel’s architecture frames the encounter, making the contrast even more striking.
Right angles. Hard concrete. Straight lines. Then this enormous golden spiral winding through it all, interrupting the architecture and breaking up the rhythm of the path.
The scale is dramatic. You walk beneath and between these inflated forms while their reflective surfaces bend the buildings, the greenery, the sky—and you—into the sculpture.
My curiosity became physical. I estimated the inflated tube to be about seven feet in diameter. I wanted to feel how this enormous structure would respond to the energy of a body, so I gave it a full-on shoulder check.
My friend was concerned. “Daniele, what are you doing?”
“I’m testing its strength,” I told him. “I want to feel how it reacts to this kind of energy in public.”
The reflective skin, which I initially thought might be Mylar, is golden mirrored TPU—thermoplastic polyurethane—with ventilators maintaining its inflated form. Standing beside it, I was curious about the relationship between that material, its internal pressure, and the monumental form they created together. How much would it give? What resistance would I feel? For that moment, my attention moved from its appearance to its construction.
This massive soft sculpture discombobulates the whole experience. It wakes me up. I’m looking up, looking around, paying attention again.
As someone who experiences the world aesthetically—a designer, an architect, a deep thinker, and someone others might call an artist—I need these encounters. Coming into close contact with art installations, sculpture, architecture, interiors, and the natural world is essential to my creative life.
When I experience an environment, I take in its forms, its light, its sounds—the music, if there is any, and the movement around me. I feel myself responding, often before I can articulate why. With this sculpture, the scale, the softness, and the reflective gold change how I perceive the architecture around it. I want to move closer, walk beneath it, see what happens from another angle.
That kind of encounter gives me something to think about, something to feel, and something that stays with me as I return to my own work.
That is what this golden spiral brought into a path I thought I knew so well: another way of seeing.
Form, material, contrast, and scale changing how we experience a place we absolutely knew and unconsciously ignored.
That’s Living Design in Practice.
Written by Danielé Perna
Principal Designer | Daniele Perna Designs
