Nashville International Airport

‘Lyrical Journeys’ Interactive Light Sculpture

Nashville International Airport’s (BNA) Board of Commissioners recently approved a dynamic public artwork to suspend from the ceiling of the airport’s new Concourse D when it opens this summer. The installation, titled “Lyrical Journeys,” will be a permanent addition to BNA’s public art collection to be enjoyed by the airport’s more than 17 million passengers annually.

“Lyrical Journeys” was designed by RE:site Studio’s Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee (Houston, Texas) as a playful homage to the sights and sounds of Nashville. The interactive light sculpture will be suspended over the food and retail hub of BNA’s new Concourse D, adding aesthetic beauty with cascading rhythms of meandering light.

“BNA has a longstanding tradition of investing in impactful public art, and we are proud to add ‘Lyrical Journeys’ to our collection for all of our passengers to enjoy,” said Doug Kreulen, BNA president and CEO. “We congratulate the artists, Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee, on being selected for this public art project, and we look forward to unveiling this dramatic sculpture when Concourse D opens next summer.”

Measuring 90 feet long and 17.5 feet wide, “Lyrical Journeys” will be constructed with 14 pairs of steel bridge plates and 20 linear strings of LED light, which will create an interactive experience for travelers. The LED light strands will brighten and darken in rapid succession as passengers walk beneath, creating the impression that they’re strumming the light strands as they would an instrument.

“As artists, we draw on a site’s cultural landscape to generate strong narrative concepts that resonate with local meanings, but also transform and transcend the familiar,” said artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee. “Our work is about making connections between themes and ideas that are not typically seen as related, but in fact have deeply interconnected resonances that converge in a site-specific context. Our proposal for Nashville International Airport’s Concourse D, ‘Lyrical Journeys,’ completely embodies this approach.”