Strata
A 40-foot climate-responsive sculpture for Mesa City Hall, originated and led by Coherent Sense — three twisting LED archways translating Mesa’s Climate Action Plan into evolving site-specific video art.
A civic centerpiece for a city terraforming itself
Mesa is a desert city actively reshaping its relationship to the climate it sits inside. Strata was commissioned as the public face of that work — a sculptural front door for the new City Hall.
The new City Hall was conceived as a civic building of glass and visible work. The brief asked for a sculptural centerpiece that would meet the architecture at the same register: not monument, not media wall, but a work alive to the same climate the city itself is shaped by — performing Mesa’s Trees Are Cool canopy initiative and Climate Action Plan in real time, accountable and ongoing.
The deep-time spiral
Driving Mesa, talking to residents and specialists, a single image kept returning — the strata themselves, layered millennia stacked into the cliff face. The Sonoran Desert as a record of time you can read.
The conceptual frame arrived in the field. Erosion as a creative force, geology as record. From this came the geological deep-time spiral — a scientific concept that doubles as a visual motif deeply rooted in Indigenous and Mesoamerican calendrical traditions. Mayan time, Western geology, both reading time as continuous and layered.
Three archways, one buried spiral
The mountain ranges visible from Mesa’s valleys, deconstructed into three primary forms. Steel arcs that hold curved LED panels — an abstracted range that reads as both landmark and threshold.
Three twisting archways that, viewed from the side, read as a single continuous form — a spiral buried on its side. The brain fills the gap between the three arcs. The work’s opening is oriented 250 degrees toward the western horizon, so the geometry aligns with sunrise and sunset throughout the year.
LED panels that bend in two directions
As simple as the form looks, building it required curved video walls that bend on two axes simultaneously — uncommon hardware, unforgiving tolerances.
Standard curved LED hardware bends on one axis. Strata required panels that bend on two at once, with a steel armature beneath them following the same compound curvature without telegraphing tolerance gaps to the surface above. Fabrication ran across two countries — built with FabLab Mexico, transported to Arizona, crossing the border days before tariff policy shifts that would have made the project economically impossible.
From climate API to LED surface
A custom data pipeline reads from Mesa’s Climate Action Plan endpoints and third-party weather APIs, drives generative simulations in Unreal Engine, and renders to the curved LED form in real time.
Twelve environmental parameters across two simulation states — temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation, humidity, air quality, water consumption, energy use, time of day, solar position, and tree-planting events from the Trees Are Cool initiative. Each parameter maps to a visual variable through a custom rule set. Air quality shapes a vortex’s topology — chaotic when conditions are bad, fluid when they’re good.
The pipeline is local, not cloud-based. Data ingest, generative simulation in Unreal Engine, and render to LED all happen on-site. “We didn’t use generative AI,” Adrian Yu noted in IMPULSE. “It would have been contradictory.” The work runs on the climate of this city, at this moment — not the statistical residue of a model trained somewhere else.
Day and night, wind and water
By day, the sculpture runs a watery scene that resembles a riverbed. By night, it shifts to a wind-and-dust simulation. Real-time changes in temperature, wind speed, and humidity move the velocity, color, and lighting of the simulation as you watch.
The light source within the simulation tracks the actual position of the sun. Sunsets and sunrises generate inside the work, mirrored against the real ones happening behind it. The transition from day to night is a continuous gradient, not a clock-driven cut.
Every time Mesa plants a tree under the Trees Are Cool initiative, a new tree spawns inside the simulation. The artwork keeps a living count of the city’s climate work — both celebration and quiet form of accountability.
Two years, one continuous form
Concept lock to operational handoff: nearly two years. Steel cut and welded in Mexico City, LED panels sourced and tested separately, archways assembled, calibrated, disassembled for transport, and rebuilt on the Mesa City Hall plaza.
A landmark for a civic threshold
Mesa City Hall was designed to be transparent and accessible — a building of glass and visible work. Strata sits at its threshold as both gateway and continuing dialogue with the climate the city is shaped by.
City Hall employees pass through the work daily. Mesa residents encounter it during civic visits, evening walks, public events. Long-form architectural video — content that unfolds over decades rather than minutes, transcending the loop that begins and ends.
- Creative Direction & Design Lead
- Coherent Sense
- Artist
- Adrian Yu
- Fabrication & Execution
- Digital Ambiance
- Architect
- Adaptive Architects
- Client
- City of Mesa
- Year
- 2025
- Materials
- Painted steel, stainless steel, LED panels, generative software
- Dimensions
- 40′ × 8.5′ × 10′