An arcade of iron and glass, running straight through a city block in New York. By day the vault does all the work: light falls through the panes, shifts with the weather, draws a long bright grid across the floor. Our brief began after sunset, when the glass turns to mirror and the passage loses its depth. We were asked for light that would keep the height of the place rather than flatten it.

What we hung under the vault

We worked with the PostCrissi pendants, their shades hand-pleated in fibreglass, and set them in a slow line down the centre of the arcade. Every pleat folds the light before it leaves, so what reaches the ironwork and the stone is ribbed and soft at the edges, never a hard pool. Hung at varying heights, they read as one long breath of light beneath the ribs of the roof.

Fibreglass holds its own texture in the dark. Lit from within, the folds return as shadow on the shade itself, and the arcade gains a second surface: glass above, pleated light below. Passers-by slow down. A few stop and look up.

Installed in 2011, the passage still runs on that single line of pendants. Light through glass by day, light folded by hand at night. The building did the rest.