La Flèche dans les Nuages

Strasbourg cathedral was built between the 12th and 15th centuries. The exceptional building is now among the most significant cathedrals in european architectural history, as well as one of the largest sandstone buildings in the world. In the Middle Ages, the 142­metre­high tower was the highest manmade building. It is hardly surprising that the city of strasburg regularly celebrates its cathedral, for example with extensive public mapping projects. This was also the case in the year 2018, but this time ACT Lighting Design thought up something new.

The theme was to be the final building construction period of the tower between the 14th and 15th century. At that time, the Place du Château next to the cathedral was a gigantic building site. Many builders cut stone, forged metal and developed the most innovative lifting machines and building scaffolding of the time. The fact that this miraculous construction project was actually realised is thanks to the building masters and medieval architects ulrich and Hultz. It was especially Hultz and his craziness that kept driving the boundaries of the imagination and of the technical methods of the time forwards.

In order to recount this building history on the original site, ACTLD used a new mapping concept: video netting. right in the middle over the Place du Château, a 400­squaremetre large net was stretched that served as a projection surface and allowed the projection of a story “onto the sky”. The public event called “La Flèche dans les Nuages”, which translates as “The Arrow in the Clouds”, invited the public to discover the various protagonists of this technical, artistic and human period of history in a novel way.