The floor in the Pittsburgh International Airport’s Airside Terminal is in the process of being turned upside down by a local artist.
Crews are installing the work of Clayton Merrell on the floor of the terminal’s Center Core, which connects the escalators from the people movers to the four concourses.
“You can imagine if you are laying on your back looking up at the sky… the terminal is going to be an inversion of that where you will be walking on the sky and the horizon will be encircling that,” said artist and CMU professor Clayton Merrell.
Crews have already started to pull up the existing tile to make way for the installation of the terrazzo artwork.
It’s enormous,” Merrell said. “The project, when it’s finished, covers about an acre and a half of ground, about 69,000 square feet.”
It will take more than a year to prep the floor, install the terrazzo and then polish the surface to a high gloss.
Along with the sky and the horizon, Merrell’s work includes five silhouettes of iconic Pittsburgh locations.
Merrell said there will be a silhouette of downtown as seen from the Ohio River, an incline, the Smithfield Street Bridge, the Northshore, Oakland and the Kerry Furnace.
The artists said he wanted to take the mundane experience of walking to catch a plane and transform it into an “out of body experience as if you are sort of flying through the sky.”
