dYdX

Crypto exchange company dYdX recently opened an East Coast office in Manhattan. Dedicated to a strong work-life balance for their employees, the office had to be a place of productivity, facilitating collaborative work and open communication, but it also had to be one where wellness was a priority.

That’s why their new space includes this meditation room, a tranquil place where employees, alone or in small groups, can take a break from their hectic days to recalibrate, refocus, and refresh.

To create a luminous center of focus with subtle, soothing dynamism, the team looked to artist James Turrell’s Skyspace installations, which feature open skylights that allow the natural light to infuse their spaces with different colors throughout the day. dYdX’s space didn’t have the luxury of an actual skylight, so they recruited Nanometer to create something evocative of a portal to a shifting sky.

Nanometer created a NanoTex Square fixture using the Sustainable Efficient fabric at 60″ x 120″ layered over flexible RGBW Pixel Controlled LED panels. The Pixel Controls allow the LEDs to be programmed into color-shifting animations that imbue the space with washes of light, while the gentle cyclical pattern can aid with breathing and meditation exercises.

As the colors shift, for example from a cool minty green to a warm, rich red, the atmosphere of the room changes as well, inspiring those inside to reflect on different moods, feelings, and ideas, and then let them pass as the cycle shifts again.

The meditation room’s design, which has no right-angle corners, inspired the decision to have the fixture feature a concave curvature, rather than simply being a flat panel. The cold-stretch fabric lens is perfect for this kind of application, as its flexibility allows for all kinds of unconventional and unexpected shapes. The fabric’s keder edge is inserted into the frame — no heat required — and the result is a mind-bending recess that interacts with the cycling light to facilitate a mental respite.