Los Angeles’ Culver City will soon boast a perennially cheerful vista: Sony has received official approval to erect a US$1.5 million artificial rainbow over the studio’s Madison Avenue gate. The gargantuan artwork by Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset will be about nine stories high and span 188 feet.

Sony’s public art project team commissioned Tony Tasset’s sculpture, which the artist himself describes as speaking to “the sense of optimism and well-being associated with rainbows in general, and more specifically with the rainbow in popular culture as imagined in the iconic Wizard of Oz film, created in the very movie studio that will become home to the Rainbow sculpture.”

The sculpture will be created from a welded steel truss and clad with aluminum panels. Its colorful facade will be custom finished with a resin-based paint that has a life expectancy against chalking and fading of at least 20 years – incidentally also the same paint used on the white panels of the famous Getty Center’s exterior. The bulk of the fabrication will be constructed off-site, with on-site installation taking between six and eight weeks sometime in early- to mid-2012.

Given the scale of Rainbow, it will be visible 24 hours per day, 7 days per week from spots just outside the Sony lot, including the Madison Avenue gate, as well as from various vantage points around Culver City.

Sony

Via [Gizmodo]