Writer: Dan Ray
Photos: Joelle Blanchard
Nearly 75 years after Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” put Mason City on the map as the inspiration for the fictional River City, the city’s real-life riverfront received a dramatic makeover. In June 2025, local leaders unveiled the new Riverwalk and Bill Schickel Plaza, named for a former mayor and featuring a playground, native perennials and prairie grasses.
The plaza also features “Harmony in Light,” a gateway sculpture by HYBYCOZO, an artist duo based in Los Angeles. A series of human-height steel cylinders rises and falls like a sound wave, a nod to “The Music Man,” and each cylinder is perforated with intricate, undulating patterns inspired by the Prairie School architecture popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright.
“We spent a lot of time researching the Prairie School history in Mason City, especially the strong horizontal lines, the sense of rhythm and repetition, and the way those buildings feel connected to the landscape,” artist Yelena Filipchuk said. “We were really interested in that design language — how ordered and calm it feels, and how much it relies on pattern, proportion and flow.”
By day, the sculpture casts complex geometric shadows. At night, lights inside each cylinder illuminate the cutouts and project their patterns across the plaza. Where the shifting projections overlap, visitors can feel as though they’re walking through a crashing wave of light.
HYBYCOZO (pronounced hib-eco-zo) has installed public artworks around the world, including Brazil, Dubai and Türkiye. The artists named “Harmony in Light” to reflect the work’s specific connections to Mason City.
“For us, the most interesting public art projects are the ones where the location can really shape the work,” Filipchuk said. “Mason City has such a strong identity — architecturally, culturally, historically — that it felt like a place with a very real story to respond to. That’s always more exciting to us than making something that could be installed in any city.”
