Solar Temple

Most art on a wall looks the same at 8am and 8pm. This one doesn't. Solar Temple is a large carved wood-and-brass piece with fins arranged like the rays of the sun. As the sun crosses the sky through the day, the shadows those fins throw move and change — the sculpture is never quite the same twice. And it can be aligned to your own wall so that at a chosen moment — sunrise, noon, or sunset — the shadows line up into one clean pattern.

The idea is old and specifically Indian. In the early 18th century, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur built five open-air observatories in stone, called Jantar Mantar, at Jaipur, Delhi, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi, completed between 1724 and 1735 [Jantar Mantar, Wikipedia]. These weren't telescopes — they were giant instruments that used the sun's own shadow to measure time and track the heavens. The largest, the Samrat Yantra ("Supreme Instrument") in Jaipur, is a stone sundial that the BBC describes as "a 27.5m high and 45m long triangle" whose angled edge acts as the shadow-caster; you can literally watch time move, because the shadow travels roughly a hand's width every minute, and the instrument gives the time "to an accuracy of two seconds" [BBC Sky at Night Magazine]. Jai Singh is credited with devising the Samrat Yantra himself [Samrat Yantra, jantarmantar.org]. That's the tradition Solar Temple draws from: a building that reads the sky by shadow.

Layered onto that is the look of Art Deco — the design style launched at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris [Britannica]. Art Deco loved exactly the sunburst-and-ray geometry, clean symmetry and "luxury in the quality of the material" that this piece uses [Proantic, Art Deco 1925]. It's the visual bridge between an 18th-century observatory and a modern room.