Fabric manufactured by a leading technical specialist Setex-Textil from warp beams produced on a Karl Mayer warping machine was used to cover Christo’s Floating Piers in a new art installation that was designed to last for sixteen days this summer.

A 3-kilometre-long walkway was created as The Floating Piers extended across the water of Lake Iseo. The piers were 16 meters wide and approximately 35 cm high with sloping sides. The fabric continued along 2.5 kilometres of pedestrian streets in Sulzano and Peschiera Maraglio.

“Those who experienced The Floating Piers felt like they were walking on water – or perhaps the back of a whale,” said Christo, the designer behind the installation. “The light and water transformed the bright yellow fabric to shades of red and gold throughout the sixteen days.”

Bridge construction

The “wrapping” artist Christo collaborated with Setex-Textil in conjunction with other experts to produce the project. As part of this art installation, the two specialists anchored a floating bridge on Lake Iseo in Lombardy, Italy. This temporary installation linked the two islands of Monte Isola and San Paola with the town of Sulzano on the mainland, and invited the public to come and walk on water.

The bridge construction consisted of 100,000 square metres of yellow fabric, carried by a modular floating dock system of a total of 200,000 high-density floating polyethylene cubes to create the perfect experience of walking on water. The cubes were joined together to produce 100-m-long segments, and the sections were anchored to the bottom of the lake by concrete blocks weighing 5.5 t.

Visual impact

The floating construction was covered with fabric to give the functional work of art real visual impact. The textile covered the deep blue surface of the lake like a dahlia-yellow-coloured ribbon, which changed colour depending on how the light impinged on it.

To produce the fabric required, Christo worked with a long-term partner, Setex-Textil GmbH. This textile company, which is based in Münsterland, manufactured the 100,000 m2 of fabric for the Floating Piers from polyamide 6.6, and produced the warp beams for the fabric on a Karl Mayer sectional warping machine.

www.karlmayer.com