Walk to the Race Street side of The Franklin Institute, and you’ll encounter Ned Kahn’s mesmerizing Shimmer Wall. This dynamic, 3,000-square-foot kinetic sculpture features 12,500 small aluminum panels that capture and amplify the play of wind and light, revealing the subtle, shifting patterns in the environment. The installation ripples like water even on relatively calm, overcast days, creating a visual experience that is uniquely different from one moment to the next.

An environmental artist from Northern California, Kahn is known for creating large-scale installations shaped by nature’s forces. “The surface of water is such an expressive thing that it kind of reveals all the things that are acting on it,” the artist told KQED. “My artwork seeks to make something like that visible.” As with the Shimmer Wall, air currents—whether natural or manmade—are a central theme in his work.

Commissioned as part of the 2013 expansion of The Franklin Institute, which added the 53,000-square-foot Nicholas and Athena Karabots Pavilion, the Shimmer Wall also serves a functional purpose. Given the need for windowless exhibition spaces in the new wing, the architects at SaylorGregg sought Kahn’s work to animate what might otherwise be a bare facade.

“In a time when digital screens have become ubiquitous,” wrote Inga Saffron for The Philadelphia Inquirer, “this analog exhibit demonstrates a basic scientific principle as effortlessly and elegantly as the hands-on exhibits in the Franklin’s original galleries, proving that old ideas are sometimes the most modern of all.”

Kahn has created a number of “shimmer walls” over the years, including Articulated Cloud (2004) at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Glacial Facade (2006) in Issaquah, Washington, and Firefly (2012) in San Francisco.

This artwork is part of the Along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway tour