Christo's latest

The New York Times has an article by Elisabetta Povoledo about The Floating Piers:

It was a long-held dream but, finally, this week, the artist Christo walked on water.
On Thursday, the artist tried out his latest project, The Floating Piers, a walkway stretching three kilometers to connect two small islands in Lake Iseo, in Italy’s Lombardy region, to each other and to the mainland.
Christo walked on the floating walkway of puckered yellow-orange nylon fabric, crafted to change color according to the time of the day and the weather. On Thursday, it was pockmarked with bright orange blotches left by footsteps treading on the rain-drenched fabric. “It’s actually very painterly, like an abstract painting, but it will change all the time,” Christo, a Bulgarian-born American citizen, said of his project.
The Floating Piers is his first outdoor installation since 2005, when he and Jeanne-Claude, his collaborator and then-wife, who passed away in 2009, installed seventy-five hundred golden-paneled gates in Central Park in New York City. Like his other works, the fifteen-million-euro project will be funded through the sale of his original works.
“I think this is a record in the history of Christo’s special projects, because he and the team realized it in less than two years; normally it takes decades,” the director of the project, the curator Germano Celant, said. “So I will say that it’s an Italian and American miracle at the same time.”
“Look!” Christo said, pointing to a juncture where two pathways joined to form a bright saffron-colored V, contrasting against the deep blue of the lake. “You see! It falls in that way so you can see the movement,” he said. “It’s actually breathing.”
Getting the walkway to both gently undulate and remain securely affixed to the uneven lake bottom was the feat that has occupied engineers, construction companies, French deep-sea divers, and even a team of Bulgarian athletes drafted over the past two years. The walkway is assembled from over two hundred thousand high-density polyethylene cubes that form its sixteen-meter-wide spine, covered this week with a waterproof and stain-resistant fabric made by a German company for the project.
“Each project is like a slice of our lives,’’ Christo said, “and part of something that I will never forget.”
The project is expected to draw as many as forty thousand people a day. From 17 June 2016 through 3 July 2016, the project will be open and free to the public all day and all night, with a legion of boat hands, lifeguards, stewards, and information officers standing guard to avert unintentional dips in the lake.
“It’s really a physical thing, you need to be there, walking it, on the streets, here. And it’s demanding,” Christo said. The route, which laps around the small island of San Paolo, also includes pedestrian areas in the towns of Sulzano, on the mainland, and Peschiera Maraglio, on Monte Isola, an islet rising out of the lake.
The project, he said, “is all this”, the piers, the lake, the mountains, “with the sun, the rain, the wind, it’s part of the physicality of the project, you have to live it.”
Christo, whose full name is Christo Javacheff, and his wife first envisaged a floating piers project nearly fifty years ago, when they were approached by an Argentine art historian who suggested the Río de la Plata basin in South America as a site, but the plans fell through. In 1995, they considered reviving it in Tokyo Bay in Japan, but that project, too, was never realized. But Christo was determined.
Apart from sporadic protests by labor unions and a national environmental organization worried about its impact on the lake, the Italian project went smoothly after local officials and administrators came on board.
But the concerns about the ability of a small lake community to deal with the avalanche of visitors the project is expected to draw appear to have been muted, for now, by enthusiasm for the project. Lake Iseo is arguably northern Italy’s least famous lake, overshadowed by neighboring Lake Garda. But hotels and other lodging options here and in nearby towns are nearly fully booked for the duration of the run.
“Lake Iseo won’t be the same after this event,” said Fiorello Turla, the mayor of Monte Isola. “Monte Isola will change skin”, as its exposure to the global spotlight puts it on the map, he said. “It’s a great opportunity that we’ve been given, and that we want to seize it and bring forward.”
At the close of its sixteen-day period, the walkway will be dismantled and its parts recycled and resold. “The important part of this project is the temporary part, the nomadic quality,” Christo said. “The work needs to be gone, because I do not own the work, no one does. This is why it is free.”

Rico says everything the man touches is amazing (as is the woman in the photo)...