Chicago has been getting bombarded with cold and snow this winter. And earlier this week we had one of the heaviest snowfalls I’ve experienced in my 20+ years living here. Followed by, as luck would have it, a morning of sunshine. So, I headed to check out one of the city’s newest pieces of public art, Olafur Eliasson’s Atmospheric Wave Wall on the side of the Willis Tower.

What a great new addition to the city! The predominant feature is the sense of motion created as you move past the wall.

The three-dimensional wall seems both random and orderly depending on how you view it. Based on Penrose tiling, which was discovered by mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose in the 1970s, this approach produces a system of non-periodic tiling that is based on five-fold symmetry.

The colors and curvature of the tiles draw inspiration from the surfaces of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.