La Mariposa, The Monarch San Antonio, Texas

La Mariposa, The Monarch San Antonio

June 9, 2026

Location: The Monarch San Antonio, Hemisfair Park, downtown San Antonio, Texas, United States of America

Architects: Overland Partners

Photos by Jeff Zaruba

Blending elements of architecture, art, sculpture, technology, graphics lighting and engineering, La Mariposa and its surrounding pavilion was designed as both a work of public art and activation opportunity for The Monarch San Antonio, a newly opened hotel sited in San Antonio’s Hemisfair Park.

Overland Partners, also the architect of The Monarch hotel, worked diligently with both the client and its technical partners to execute an architectural work of public art that incorporated the palette and materials of the surrounding civic park, integrating the pavilion’s landscaping in a way that invites park visitors to interact with the sculpture itself. Additionally, the sculpture acts as an interactive space for the hotel, which activates it for public and private events alike.

La Mariposa’s design takes inspiration from the monarch butterfly and its migratory path through San Antonio. The three main sculptures, which appear as a small, medium and large wing, represent the notion of monarch migration further, mirroring the three generations of monarchs required to complete the full migration path. Additionally, the multilayered graphic pattern and the way it is lit speaks to the word “kaleidoscope” — defined as a group of butterflies, but also in reference to the optical instrument that uses mirrors and loose colored objects to create an ever-changing, beautiful symmetry and design.

La Mariposa’s outside skin is an abstraction of a single Monarch butterfly wing. Meanwhile, its inside skin is comprised of a layering of smaller, abstracted butterflies. The interior graphic has more density on the bottom and the pieces appear to swirl out into the blue sky as the structure reaches upward.

The skin is comprised of approximately 410 glass triangle panels ranging from 4 feet to six feet. As each panel is unique in terms of graphic and shape, they are numbered supporting ease of fabrication as well as indexing in the event a panel needs to be replaced. A corresponding catalog was also created, assigning each glass panel its corresponding graphic.

Overland Partners and Novum utilized 3D digital design and physical modeling to design the shapes. Direct-to-fabrication 3D models were used for the structure and glazing. Client design reviews were done in virtual reality to help share the interactive nature of the work, its scale and the potential for visitor experience.

The final design is 24 feet tall at its highest point and stretches more than 65 feet in length across the sculpture’s three unique wings. Both skins are heat-soaked laminated glass, allowing the sculpture to be both structural and safe.

The graphic art, which is owned by Zachry Hospitality, appears across the glass skins, is comprised of hundreds of graphic layers of abstracted butterflies in various layers of transparency and overlap. This resulted in a dynamic sense of visual depth and movement. The graphic itself is printed on the inner layer of each of the glass panels. An additional translucent layer then gives the image additional depth and opacity and helps diffuse the light.

Multiple mockups of the graphic pattern were created in partnership with the glass fabricator and lighting designer in order to achieve the desired lighting effect, depth and color saturation. A similar graphic was scaled up and is utilized on the hotel’s 17th floor as an angled glass backlit soffit. This allows guests in the park to see the monarch pattern at eye level via La Mariposa, and to look up and see the pattern mirrored from 17 floors below.

As part of the fabrication of La Mariposa, the design team built a full-scale mockup of a section of the pavilion to test the structure, glazing, fasteners, brackets, sealant, lighting and edge metals.

The design and fabrication team included Overland Partners (architect and designer); Thornton Tomasetti (structural engineer for the sculpture’s foundation); Novum (fabricator and engineer of record for the structural steel form and glass); and ISI Automation (lighting designer).

La Mariposa, The Monarch San Antonio, Texas – Building Information

Design team:

Overland Partners – based in San Antonio
Structural engineer Thorton Tomasetti, based in Houston, engineer for the foundations

Novum (fabricator and engineer of record for the structural steel form and glass): engineering was done in Germany, the fabrication of the steel frame in Turkey and the glass was fabricated in China.

The lighting designer, ISI Automation, is based out of Mexico and Texas, and did the lighting design for the San Antonio Alamo dome and convention center. 