This image represents six weeks of planning, three days of installation, and exactly four hours of shooting before physics won. We partnered with a luxury rooftop venue to create what would become Bangkok’s most ambitious temporary art installation – a perfectly circular frozen platform 40 stories above one of the world’s hottest cities during peak season.
The circular platform was the real engineering challenge. We designed a 10-meter diameter aluminum base with an intricate network of refrigeration coils running in concentric circles, connected to industrial compressors powerful enough to maintain sub-zero temperatures against Bangkok’s relentless 36°C heat. The system pumped coolant continuously, creating a genuine frozen surface that had to support the weight of multiple ice pillars while maintaining its mirror-smooth finish. We built up the ice surface in thin layers over 72 hours, each freeze cycle monitored to prevent cracking. The edge definition was critical – we needed that sharp circular boundary where frozen met warm to create the dramatic condensation cascade. The vapor rolling off the platform’s perimeter wasn’t staged; it was pure physics, the collision of arctic and tropical air creating a continuous fog waterfall that caught every bit of available light.
The ice pillars themselves were pre-frozen in commercial kitchen deep-freeze units, each one embedded with waterproof RGB LED strips during the freezing process. Once solid, we transported them via service elevator and positioned them across the circular platform in varying heights, creating the cathedral effect. The platform’s refrigeration kept them stable, though we could see the melting begin almost immediately at the bases where the LEDs generated minimal heat. The real magic was watching the sunset light interact with the rising steam while the pillars glowed from within, the circular frozen zone creating its own microclimate suspended above the city.
What makes this image particularly striking is that impossible boundary – the perfect circle where winter meets summer, where frost meets humidity, where our engineered cold surrendered to tropical reality one millimeter at a time. By midnight, the platform was a puddle and the pillars were memory. The photograph captures the four-hour window when we successfully froze a piece of the sky above Bangkok, the circular stage holding just long enough to prove it could exist, even if it couldn’t last.