Imagine standing under a pavilion during a torrential downpour. Picture the sight of water gushing down in all directions, the smell the rain leaves as it crashes to the ground, and the feeling your skin experiences from the misty air being moved around so rapidly. Now imagine stepping out into that downpour, but instead of being saturated within seconds, you stay completely dry.

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This is the sensation you experience within the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Rain Room.

With a combination of cunning technology and a touch of smoke and mirrors, the Rain Room allows you to walk across a 1,500-square-foot water drain during a heavy rainfall without coming out completely soaked.

As each individual steps into the seemingly unstoppable wall of water, sensors pick up their presence and seize the water outlet directly above them, leaving about a six-foot dry spell encompassing each person on the grated floor. Every other sprinkler, however, continues to crash down rain like no other.

In one corner of the dark room is a single spotlight to bring the falling water to life. From different perspectives around the light, you can experience silhouettes with bodies against the illumination and glimmering rainfall with the light refracting through each drop.

The room allows for up to seven people to be inside the storm at once, for 15-minute periods. 

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When the Rain Room made its debut in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013, those who looked to experience the room for themselves were willing to stand in line for up to eight hours, according to the Huffington Post. The L.A. Times also added that the same exhibit brought in a remarkable 74,222 viewers during an 11-week span, averaging about 1,000 visitors per day.

However, Los Angeles isn’t exactly the first place you'd think would elect to bring in an artificial rain display while experiencing such a severe drought.

"It's the water footprint of a hamburger," Hannes Koch, one of the designers of the exhibit and co-founder of Random International, a London-based art collective explained in a recent L.A. Times article. "You need as much water in Rain Room as you need to make a Big Mac, from feeding the cows, industrial production, growing the lettuce and tomato, the whole process. It's basically a couple of bathtubs of water, recycled."

The Rain Room uses around 528 gallons of water from the museum’s water main, however, it’s the same 528 gallons being recycled through time and time again to fuel the exhibit.

"We knew drought was a massive issue here," Koch mentioned. "The installation is really efficient; think of the impact you can have with this much water compared to the wastefulness in other contexts, like meat production."

Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum, admitted it was too early to decide whether the Rain Room would find a permanent home in Hollywood, but Koch and his partner Florian Ortkrass are aiming to have a home for their exhibit soon, rather than have it on tour.

Though its future is undetermined at the moment, the Rain Room will be open to experience in the LACMA until March 6. 

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