Transit Skylight

1988 Newkirk Avenue (B, Q) New York City Transit

David Wilson's skylight fills the waiting area of this Brooklyn subway station with bright, clear light. The panels are framed in blue and the pattern in the panes consists of black lines and solid panels in geometric form, that echoes the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement and leaded glass work from that era, but with a more contemporary interpretation. "I had been interested in the use of plastics and the possibility of 'leadlines' that are not feasible in glass — thus the diagonal 'cuts' going to nowhere in the piece (i.e. stopping in the middle of a color)," Wilson says. "The project is a kind of architectural statement — a skylight set into a difficult environment (a steel I-beam divides the triangular window into two halves so that it is hard to read as a whole)."