A public installation that turns Jacksonville’s musical heritage into a living score
In Florida, studio The Urban Conga translates a century of local musical heritage into an interactive landscape of dichroic panels and deconstructed lyrics, inviting passersby to rewrite the city’s identity through a playful, ever-evolving act of collective authorship.
There is something quietly radical about a public artwork designed, from the outset, to remain unfinished. A Cappella, the new installation by Brooklyn-based studio The Urban Conga, does exactly that – not as a fleeting conceptual gesture, but as a structural commitment embedded in every design choice.
Situated within the Jacksonville Riverfront Music Garden along the St. Johns River, adjacent to the Jacksonville Symphony, A Cappella occupies a musical note carved into the landscape. Drawing from a collection of 84 songs by more than 60 local artists spanning the 1920s through the 2020s, the premise is deceptively simple: Jacksonville’s musical heritage is not a static archive to be preserved behind glass, but an open-ended conversation that any passerby can extend.
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A Cappella installation by The Urban Conga:
A symphony mapped onto the landscape
The installation is organized into four sections mirroring the movements of a symphony – motivation, home, love, and freedom – each dictated by its own tempo, emotional register, and atmosphere. The progression is deliberate. Visitors moving through the space sequence encounter the work as a scored experience rather than a static exhibition, where energy and forward momentum gradually give way to contemplation, intimacy, and ultimately, a wide-reaching emotional resolution. It is a physical landscape entirely shaped by musical logic.
What sets the project apart is that its core material came directly from the community. Through an extensive public engagement process, Jacksonville residents identified the songs and lyrics that most accurately reflected the city’s character across genres, generations, and neighborhoods. This distinction matters: the resulting collection is not a curatorial selection imposed from the outside, but a collective portrait assembled by the people it represents.
Lyrics become a tool for collective authorship
The Urban Conga then deconstructed these selected lyrics into individual words and short phrases, inviting visitors to rearrange and recombine them into entirely new compositions. The interactive mechanism allows anyone to thread a contemporary rap line through a Prohibition-era verse, or remix a 1940s blues lyric against a rock song from the last decade. This act of recombination is the entire point. It surfaces unexpected thematic connections across time, revealing how ideas about home, freedom, and belonging have resonated in Jacksonville for a century without ever being frozen into a single, definitive narrative.
An ever-changing score of light and color
Dichroic and reflective panels define the visual language of the piece, shifting color, light, and shadow as the day progresses and visitors move through the site. The panels function simultaneously as surface and atmosphere, ensuring that each visit is formally distinct from the last – a fitting choice for a work arguing that cultural expression is inherently fluid, recombinant, and alive.
Integrated seating areas encourage gathering and conversation throughout, while a central circular bench serves as the installation’s communal anchor. By contextualizing the relationship between the four symphonic movements and the layout of the artwork, the bench transforms the act of understanding the piece into a shared, social experience rather than a solitary reading of a plaque.
Crucially, A Cappella is built to grow. Its modular framework is designed to accommodate new artists as Jacksonville’s musical story continues to evolve, positioning the installation as an open score for future voices to rewrite. This is perhaps the most rigorous claim the work makes: that the most honest form of cultural commemoration is one that leaves itself incomplete by design.
Designing participation through play
Behind the project is The Urban Conga, an award-winning multidisciplinary design studio led by Ryan Swanson and Maeghann Coleman, AIA, NOMA. Working at the intersection of architecture, urban design, public art, and social practice, the studio has built its practice around a core conviction: that play, implemented as a serious methodological tool – both within the final work and throughout the community-driven design process – can transform overlooked spaces into vital platforms for collective exchange, curiosity, and lifelong learning. A Cappella stands as one of the clearest expressions of that vision to date.
