After Lauren Halsey’s installation at The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, New York, April 18–October 22, 2023. Independent interpretation, not an official museum experience.
The artist’s gallery records overall dimensions of 6.7 × 21.5 × 10.7 metres, in glass-fiber-reinforced concrete and mixed media. Its catalogue date is 2022; this page depicts the 2023 Met presentation. These dimensions guide the model’s tallest edge and installation footprint.
The Met explicitly describes a structure visitors may inhabit. A published on-site photographic tour documents four sphinxes, four portrait columns, approximately 750 concrete tiles, two opposite corner entrances and a square opening in the ceiling. The photographs show diagonal circulation through the interior, with an exterior route around the work.
The central chamber is modelled approximately 8.5 metres square with a 4.4-metre square ceiling opening. Wall thickness, entrance width, individual sculpture dimensions, plinth heights and exact relative positions are estimated from photographs. The overall published dimensions are not a surveyed floor plan. The model represents two opposite corner entry zones, each opening around a retained corner pier, with a continuous diagonal interior route. Users can circle the work, enter, cross the chamber and exit. Sculpture plinths, walls, planters and parapets prevent passage.
The 36 × 44-metre roof deck, museum access pavilion, pergola, benches and surrounding roof structures are interpretive scenery. The museum’s complete arrival route and contemporary access arrangements were not confirmed; the simulation begins on the terrace and does not offer access to adjacent roofs.
The original inscriptions archive specific people, businesses and visual culture of South Central Los Angeles. The surface imagery here is an original, simplified line-drawing atlas with cars, figures, palms, towers, buildings and brief words documented in coverage. It is shaded as incised concrete. It is not a transcription of the approximately 750 original panels, and its placement should not be used to identify an original inscription.
The guardian bodies and column faces use original procedural sculpture. They approximate silhouettes, facial structure and headdresses, rather than reproducing the likenesses of Halsey’s family and community members. Fine carving and anatomical detail remain the largest fidelity limitations.
Layered tree crowns, paths, lawn, water, city blocks and museum roofs are procedural scenery. Skyline positions and individual buildings are approximate. Directional sunlight and shadow mapping respond to a time-of-day control, which is an illustrative light study, not calibrated solar data or a claim of nighttime admission.
No source photographs, video frames, recordings, scans or externally licensed artwork textures are bundled. The surface drawings, geometry and preview image are generated by this project. Reference links remain available for comparison with the original installation.