39000 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270, USA
Lucy Curci Cancer Center at Eisenhower Medical Center
39000 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270, USA
Rancho Mirage, CA
The two moving beams in Erskine's natural rainbow light installation in the Eisenhower Cancer Center's Lobby, continually change shape, color and position throughout the entire day - and year.
Healing Light
Raking light from the east motorized prism creeps across wall like a sunset in a nearby desert canyon.
Heliostat solar tracking mirror
mounted 107 feet north of the lobby reflects a steady beam of white sunlight onto roof- mounted motorized prisms that project huge gliding rainbows into the Lobby.
Healing Shade
Rainbow light pattern projected from Erskine’s prisms installed in the wooden shade umbrellas in the Healing Garden
Five prism shade umbrellas designed for the Healing Garden at the Lucy Curci Cancer Center at Eisenhower Medical Center.
Looking down on the “Healing Shade” rainbow umbrella in the Healing Garden
Desert plants painted with Nature’s most beautiful rainbow light.
“Seeing a rainbow restores our connection to Nature – it restores our physical and psychic functions.” Jonas Salk, MD
Using prisms and mirrors, Peter Erskine's “Healing Light” & “Healing Shade” art installations transform ordinary Sunlight into giant, radiant solar spectrum beams - bathing patients, families and staff with the celestial, healing beauty of living rainbows. Powered by our life-giving Sun and the rotation of the Earth, these ever-changing healing spaces gradually shift in color and shape - every hour, ever day and every season. Always a fresh offering to the heart and mind.
Materials: Sunlight, Heliostat solar tracking mirror, and motorized laser-cut prisms.
“Look to the Rainbow” – Based on an interview with Peter Erskine, Excerpted from March 1, 2005 Healthcare Design Magazine
Healthcare Art that Works
In 1991 I began creating what I call Solar Spectrum Environmental Artworks, using prisms and mirrors to harness the sun’s power to create rainbows in architectural spaces where people live and work. Four years later I asked the great American scientist Dr. Jonas Salk, with whom I was visiting, why he thought this work seemed to have a more profound impact on people than any other sculptural work I had ever done during some 30 years. (I would have liked to take sole credit for this, but I suspected that there was more to it than that.) He replied, “The rainbow is a very deep memory for humans. It has been coded into our genetic material over millions of years. Seeing a rainbow restores our connection to nature—it restores our physical and psychic functions.” My meeting with Dr. Salk planted the seed in my mind that I could create healthcare art that works – and doesn’t just look pretty.
Everybody Loves a Rainbow
It is true that nearly every culture views the rainbow as a symbol of hope comfort and deliverance. The rainbow is psychologically one of the most powerful nonverbal and trans-cultural phenomena in nature, and it is an obvious choice when viewing nature as a healing medium. This became more obvious to me, I must admit, when Los Angeles psychiatrist and author, Dr. Judith Orloff, suggested that I apply my work directly to healthcare settings. The initial result can be seen, both indoors and outdoors, at the Eisenhower Lucy Curci Cancer Center in Rancho Mirage, California, a project with interiors by Jain Malkin, the most scientifically informed interior designer I’ve ever worked with.
How Rainbows Heal in the Healing Garden
The facility is located near Palm Springs, where the temperature regularly reaches 110 degrees. Outside, the designers created a Healing Garden that incorporates desert plants and running water, but because of this desert environment, the client wanted to offer artistically designed shade structures for people visiting it. My answer was five square “umbrellas” made of sustainably harvested Brazilian ironwood, each about eight feet high see photo). I built flat laser-cut prism into the perimeter of these shade structures, that refract the desert sun into radiant natural rainbow beams. (See photo # ) As an added comfort to patients and families gaining respite in the garden, we installed evaporative water misters around the shade perimeters to enhance the rainbow effect and provide cooler air. The misters lower ambient temperatures a full 15 degrees within 10 feet of the umbrellas. A big relief on hot summer days! This multi-sensory healing space of garden, cooling mist, and living rainbows has proven to be a very popular venue for physician consultations and families taking rest breaks from the stress of cancer.
Heliostat Mirror and Prisms Reflect Rainbows into Lobby
On the inside of the building, I faced the difficult challenge of bringing direct sunlight into the lobby. My solution was to install, on a nearby roof, a heliostat computer-controlled tracking mirror, photo#, which reflects a continuous 3000 watt beam of free renewable sunlight from the sun onto motorized prisms mounted outside the lobby windows. The prisms project two 12′ high by 20′ wide, gradually moving solar-spectrum beams on the lobby walls, floor, and ceiling photo#) as the sun moves through the sky, providing an ever-changing rainbow tableau. I made no attempt to conceal this technology, because I view it as a metaphor for modern healthcare’s combining high technology and nature to achieve healing.
A Living Rainbow for Every Hospital Room
I’m grateful to have working with me a team of optical physicists and solar and software engineers to put these projects together—I am no longer a “solitary sculptor.” Most recently I have used this new technology to create a light sculpture I call the “Prism Mirror Box” that can be installed on the windowsills of patient rooms (especially children!) to reflect six foot rainbow beams on the patient’s ceiling and walls that move through the room as the day progresses. The box has a swivel so the patient themselves can move the rainbows around the room on their own – giving then a delightful sense of creativity and control in an otherwise stressful situation. The “Prism Mirror Box” brings my work directly to the patient, and it’s a big breakthrough for me in healthcare design, the field where my work continues to receive the most positive response I’ve ever experienced.
