Apple’s most Instagrammable new launch isn’t the latest iPhone; artist and designer Sabine Marcelis evokes the company’s new era of transparent design.
Alongside Apple’s recent autumn product launches – the iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup, the AirPod Pro 3, and a trio of Apple Watches, as well the new 'Liquid Glass' feel of iOS26 – arrived one more thing: an ensemble of prismatic polyester resin, frosted coloured glass, and clear acrylic installations designed for Apple Park’s Observatory by colour and light impresario, Sabine Marcelis.
Sharing an obsession with flawless surfaces, the Rotterdam-based artist and designer has conjured a dynamic kaleidoscope of interactive influencer-friendly tableaus for The Observatory (opened in 2024 as a new space to showcase the brand's latest innovations), bending light and reflecting colour into corners of the subterranean sanctum. The contemplative inner space now glows as an improved stage for selfies.
Beyond offering a palette of colours redolent of Apple’s new products – Cosmic Orange, Mist Blue and Lavender – Marcelis says Apple’s Industrial Design team granted her full autonomy ‘to explore and experiment’. Informed by these newest hues, Marcelis created glass colours digitally in Photoshop, with resin components mixed manually with pigments.
‘It's a constant back and forth for me between physical prototyping and digital prototyping,’ explained Marcelis. The artist and designer credits a seamless pipeline between iOS- and macOS-powered devices for collaborative efficiency among her eight-person team. ‘We work in Rhino, KeyShot, Adobe suite and iMessage to communicate ideas throughout development with each other,’ she says.
Leveraging Apple’s advances in digital imaging with the iPhone, each final colour was reviewed for accuracy through the iPhone’s imaging sensor. ‘We took photos with flash to see how the resin would photograph, as the human eye sees resin as whiter,’ says Marcelis, describing the process of manifesting intent into material. ‘But the iPhone captures its purple undertone, which is the true observation and colour spectrum.’
The glow-up extends outside the doors of The Observatory, with a sculpture by Marcelis positioned among a field of native Californian grasses planted across a gentle slope along the Apple campus, operating as both a prismatic sundial and a waypoint marker at the crossroads between The Observatory, the Steve Jobs Theater, and Apple Park itself.
Echoing her 2018 Solo Sundial for watchmaker A Lange & Söhne, Marcelis’ Sundial sculpture for Apple Park is composed of mirror, coloured glass, and powder-coated steel. An ancient instrument reimagined as a nod to Apple’s latest light-bending iOS 26, it transforms the golden Cupertino light into shifting chromatic shadows.
Marcelis’ practice, which fuses material experimentation with a precise finesse, mirroring Apple’s micrometre-measured efforts to realise a single, seamless ‘slab of glass’, has infused a light-hearted, yet precise presence into the minimalist subterranean space of The Observatory. With these installations, Apple and Marcelis together propose architecture, technology and art as a luminous addition to the Apple campus experience.
Sabine Marcelis at Apple Park
A domestic set anchored by a languorous length of seating – a ‘Lisse’ sofa for La Cividina paired with an oak ‘Dew’ table for Arco, both by Marcelis – presents the familiar form of a living room. But the room quickly unmoors: the designer's ‘Soap Columns’ in polyester resin catch daylight, ‘Mini Lenses’ scatter colour, and a large glass slab piece shifts as guests move past.
A procession of chromatic gradient glass sculptures is flanked by resin-lens forms composed of three layers of chromatic gradients – representing, naturally, the silhouettes of iPhones.
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