Hancher Auditorium

Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects and OPN Architects replaced the University of Iowa's original Hancher Auditorium after it was heavily damaged in the 2008 Iowa River flood, setting the new 192,000-square-foot hall well above the 500-year floodplain. The building opened in September 2016 as a warm, glowing counterpart to its riverside site, its performance hall wrapped in a sequence of continuously curved balcony tiers.

Lindner fabricated a custom expanded metal wall panel for the balcony fronts, using two layers of expanded metal rotated against each other to create a moire effect. Backlit, the layered mesh scatters into what reads as a field of stars across every balcony curve in the hall, turning the fronts into a lit surface rather than a solid one.