Escaping the convoluted confines of the conventional hedge-in-a-garden, the labyrinth takes on ever more complex forms to better confuse you with, especially when mirrors, glass or mechanical elements are involved. These immersive installations use unusual materials and disorienting configurations to encourage visitors to wander, explore, face uncertainty about their paths and pause to marvel at the beauty of it all.

Maze Made of Light by Brut Deluxe

This immersive light maze made of acrylic panels with dichroic film applied to one side creates a reflective rainbow you can walk through. Once you’re inside, circles cut into the acrylic transmit colors from other areas of the maze. ‘Yûzhóu’ was craeated by architecture and design studio Brut Deluxe for the Luneng Sanya Bay Light and Art Festival in Hainan, China.

Vertical Maze Tower in Dubai

This 56-story skyscraper in Dubai is the world’s tallest vertical maze according to Guinness. DAR Consult worked with maze designer Adrian Fisher to design the eye-catching accent, highlighting it in thousands of LED lights to make it stand out after dark.

Big Maze by Bjarke Ingels Group at the National Building Museum

With high birch panel walls that tower over you along the edges shrinking to waist-height at the very center, this maze by architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group gets easier the navigate the further you go. The life-sized indoor maze was assembled inside the National Building Museum in Washington DC. “The concept is simple: as you travel deeper into a maze, your path typically becomes more convoluted,” say the architects. “What if we invert this scenario and create a maze that brings clarity and visual understanding upon reaching the heart of the labyrinth?”

Steel Labyrinth by Gijs van Vaerenbergh at C-Mine Art Centre, Belgium

The architect duo known as Gijs Van Vaerenbergh experimented with the classic form of the labyrinth for a sculptural installation at the center of the C-Mine Arts Centre in Genk, Belgium. The design, made of 5mm-thick steel plates weighing a total of 186 tons, is envisioned as a composition of walls and voids that strategically frame various areas with cut-outs. An accompanying tower outside the maze allows visitors to get a bird’s eye view of the entire thing.

Salt Labyrinths by Motoi Yamamoto

This labyrinth is so minuscule in scale, only insects could ever hope to navigate it, but it’s a wonder to take in from above. Artist Motoi Yamamoto is known for his intricate temporary sculptures made of salt, creating complex arrangements that almost seem organically formed.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Modern Mazes 15 Labyrinths Made Of Glass Steel Light And Salt

Gazing down at foamy-looking swirls of white on black from a niche in an ancient castle, you almost feel as if you’re an astronaut watching a hurricane form above the ocean on the distant Earth. These cellular arrangements form tentacular appendages of varying opacity, meeting in the center to create a vortex effect. They are, in fact, made of salt, with each grain symbolizing a memory or a moment in time. Artist Motoi Yamamoto installed ‘Floating Garden’ and ‘Labyrinth’  within the castle tower at Aigues-Mortes in Southern France for an exhibition called ‘Univers’ Sel,’ on display through the end of November.

The hurricane-like swirl of ‘Floating Garden’ is a motif commonly used to represent life, death, resurrection and rebirth in East Asia. To create it, Yamamoto started in the center of the black-floored space, shaking a container of salt in a calculated rhythm to produce just the right pattern, working for 45 hours over 5 days.

Within the ramparts, a labyrinth unfolds. Would you be able to wind your way from the outer edges of the pattern to the piles of salt that lie at the end? You’ll never find out, because to attempt it would mean destroying the work, with its intricately placed salt lines sensitive to the slightest movement. Like the sand mandalas of Tibetan monks, these salt sculptures are meant to exist temporarily, as vulnerable and ephemeral as human bodies moving through the hazardous world.

Both pieces are a continuation of series of the same names. The artist began working with salt as a medium after the loss of his sister to brain cancer at 24 years old, in rumination on time, transcendence and the notion of death. The salt structures act as an interstitial medium between our time and space within our physical world and whatever mysteries lie beyond.

“Drawing a labyrinth with salt is like following a trace of my memory,” says Yamamoto. “Memories seem to change and vanish as time goes by. However, what I seek is the way in which I can touch a precious moment in my memories that cannot be attained through pictures or writings. I always silently follow the trace, that is controlled as well as uncontrolled from the start point after I have completed it.”

This steel labyrinth looks like something left behind after the production of a dystopian film, its irregular grid of steel rising and falling onto the concrete surface outside Belgium’s C-mine art center. Designed by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, the maze is an immersive experience in what the artist sees as architecture in its essential form: “a composition of walls that define spaces.” Made of 186 tons of metal, the installation features vertical surfaces towering over 49 feet in the air to properly disorient visitors.

Entering the maze, you pass through a series of geometric doorways cut into the steel, including a sphere, a cylinder and a cone. Depending on where you are in the maze, these cut-outs might offer a tiny glimpse of what’s on the other side of a wall, or open to reveal a succession of similar cut-outs passing all the way through the installation.

The steel, and how it is cut and arranged, offers a unique architectural visual that changes according to your perspective, shifting from abstract lines into distinct geometries and sometimes creating optical illusions that make you uncertain whether you’re looking at a two-dimensional or three-dimensional surface.

A nearby installation of antique mine shafts offers a different way to experience the maze: from above. You can pass through it as an active participant, and then view it as a whole, taking in its complexities from a more detached bird’s eye view.