Rainbow’s End Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Terrazzo, approximately 80,000 square feet Concourses E and F, Terminal 3 A collaboration with artist David Griggs

The title comes from the oldest kind of promise — treasure at rainbow’s end, gold on the map, magic in the water. South Florida draws people that way. It always has.

This is the largest terrazzo commission I have undertaken — approximately 80,000 square feet across two concourses and a terminal. David Griggs and I shared the work, trading ideas back and forth through the whole process. Our work is highly contextual — it has to belong to the place it goes into, to build in the traveler a sense of anticipation for what they are about to encounter. On our first site visit we went together. We saw alligators, sea turtles, dolphins, mangrove islands. The landscape told us what the floor needed to be.

The conceptual heart of Rainbow’s End is Loren Eiseley — the anthropologist and writer whose prose I first encountered in a freshman English course taught by a professor who lasted only one year but who handed me something I have carried ever since. Eiseley’s mother lost her hearing in childhood and communicated with him by thumping on the floor. His father was an amateur Shakespearean actor. He grew up in a household that was both silent and full of language, and it made him the kind of writer who notices what most people walk past. He sees landscape with an eye that looks through time. I have read everything he wrote. His books have changed how I see the world.

His essay The Star Thrower begins on a beach after a storm, starfish strewn across the sand, a man standing at the foot of a rainbow spinning them one by one back into the sea. The narrator watches, skeptical — what difference could a single gesture make? — and then slowly joins him. “Call me another thrower,” he says. After us there will be others. In The Immense Journey Eiseley wrote that if there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Both of those ideas are in this floor.

Concourse E

The concourse opens with swirling galaxies and starfish together — the stars and the sea, the way Eiseley and Steinbeck both saw them, two writers who understood that the smallest things and the vastest distances are part of the same meditation. Walking further along, the scale shifts: diatoms, sand dollars, abstracted starfish appear and recede. Mirror and mother-of-pearl shell pieces catch the light the way stars catch on moving water at night. The concourse ends with an expanse of starfish covering a beach — the treasure at rainbow’s end, the shore itself.

Concourse F

This floor begins with a poetic moment — the sky’s reflection in water, creatures floating through air while others appear to fly beneath the sea. The constellation Cygnus, the Swan, takes flight where Terminal 3 meets the concourse, one of the many waterfowl species of the Everglades. Further along, Ursa Minor appears — the Little Dipper, with Polaris at its tip, the star that has guided travelers across this landscape for millennia. The floor grows sparser and more refined moving west, constellations giving way to random stars and the Milky Way. Manta rays fly through the sky. Imaginary nineteenth-century flying machines pass slowly overhead.

Terminal 3

The terminal holds the full complexity of the South Florida ecotone — the flow from freshwater to saltwater, from the Everglades to the west to the Atlantic to the east. Tide pools, marshes, beaches, ocean, sky. Aeronautical charts and subatomic particle paths define the modern technological sphere. Historic maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries carry a sense of discovery and human mystery. There is an old cartographic map in the floor, drawn in the manner of a treasure map, with sailing ships, invented Caribbean island names, and sea monsters in the open water. We had wanted to bury actual ceramic coins in the terrazzo — a hidden treasure. The experiments never quite worked. The map stayed.

A school of hammerhead sharks moves silently through deep blue water in one section of the terminal. We were certain someone would object to sharks surfacing beneath travelers waiting in the ticket lines. Nobody did. A constellation was removed during the review process — we never fully understood why — but the sharks were fine.

During the review, a committee member kept asking about the sheep in the floor. It took us longer than it should have to realize she meant the ships. We still laugh about that.

These floors are meant to do what terrazzo in an airport should do: connect the traveler to the place they are entering or leaving, build a sense of anticipation for what lies ahead. The story of humanity is one of great journey. Eiseley’s star thrower understood that a single gesture — one starfish returned to the sea — belongs to something larger than itself.

An architect who uses this airport regularly wrote to the airport authority after the floors were installed. He said he had never written a thank-you note to a public agency before. He said the floors were masterfully conceived, beautifully composed, and ingeniously colored, and that he had seldom seen art and poetry and function bridged so wonderfully. He felt someone deserved thanks and recognition.

I thought of Loren Eiseley.