When Boston's Red Line subway was extended past Harvard Square in the early 1980s, a significant portion of the project's budget was dedicated to funding public art. The public art program came to be known as "Arts on the Line." Here the artist describes his contribution to the program, "Blue sky on the Red Line."

When ... the architects of the Harvard Square Station asked me to collaborate on the artistic shaping of the station, I more than welcomed the opportunity. It was challenging on many levels. Harvard Square is a vital landmark, an exciting collage of life patterns, a significant site in a significant social and cultural setting.

The task demanded more than a decorative embellishment, and more than avant-garde - acrobatics to demonstrate exciting new idioms. The subway station is an essential place in a great number of people's daily life. It is an environment that could either encourage or devastatingly discourage the multitude of commuters.

For over thirty years the Harvard Square station was almost a daily experience for me but not a rewarding one. To descend into a lightless, spaceless, dirty, noisy tunnel space is a confidence-scuttling experience. My intention was to transform the present gloom-ridden atmosphere into one that has the vibrant, luminous dynamics of the open spaces above. I wanted to borrow and bring down this richness.

The need is to create with artistic means an environmental total, in which the individual artistic features—their light, color, and movement—express values through their successive interconnections.

The sequence I planned has three stages: a color-light space produced by transparent colored glass in the headhouse covering the escalator. Sunlight or artificial lights illuminating the headhouse wash the wall, framing the escalator. Arriving down at the main lobby, one glimpses a hundred foot long, nine-foot high glass wall of blue faceted glass, illuminated through a diffusing screen from the back. The rhythmical quality of this luminous blue wall would bring forth a substitute sky, offering a crescendo of openness within. The blue wall will have a narrow red glass band illuminated from behind by lights activated by the approaching buses. The waiting passenger will thereby become actively engaged in the visual dynamics of motion and passage which underlie a transit situation.