Inside New York City’s Waterfalls Installation (With Video!)

• extreme machines
• engineering
• Olafur Eliasson
• Green Design
• plumbing

NEW YORK — The skyline here is no stranger to mega engineering. But we’re used to seeing the big-rig construction sites, however, for office towers and sporting arenas—not art.

Renowned Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has transformed the world’s perception of an urban landscape before, but now he’s doing it on the largest stage ... and with some pretty heavy machinery. At four points along New York’s East River, his 90- to 120-ft.-tall scaffoldings house 300-hp Thompson drain pumps to pull water from the earth, send it over a double-trough filter, and dump it back down into intake-filter pools—all without damaging an already battered ecosystem.

“Even though it’s a scaffold standing on the shoreline, sucking water up to the top and letting it fall right back down, it’s been a big challenge to achieve this,” Eliasson said at the official unveiling of The New York City Waterfalls on Thursday. “I didn’t really want to do something very big. I just wanted something that I felt appropriate in terms of scale fitting to the city.”

Check out behind-the-scenes footage of the waterfalls on PopMech TV below, then head on over to The Public Art Fund for more on how they work:

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