From our friends at Culver City Patch we’ve found a video about David and Brian Hurley, a father-son welding team called Aero Welding that helped put together LA design firm Electroland’s new Metallotus. It’s a 30-foot-long, 1,400 pound stainless steel lotus flower  suspended 30 feet above the courtyard of the Medallion project in Downtown LA. The lotus (a symbol of downtown’s rebirth), supported by several steel cables, changes color and intensity at night thanks to programmed LED lights in the corners of the courtyard. It’s nice to see the sweat equity that goes into this kind of work. It took the Hurleys a number of weeks to complete the project—a combination of stainless steel tubes and stainless steel mesh— achieving details, curvatures, and joints that Electroland principal Cameron McNall describes as “beautiful.” 

And speaking of sweat equity, putting together something that “fell outside of any category,” as McNall puts it, was also a hurculean task. For one, the firm had to get 26 different city signoffs. And after modeling the flower first with wire, and then in Rhino, they had to get a diverse team of people (including a hanging team from St. Elmos Fire Rigging) to work together. “There was some tension,” explained McNall. But in the end it all worked out. “This is our dream. To create public art that breathes life into a social space and into a city.”