Impressed Concrete

Way back in 2013 when the MAX Orange Line was under construction, TriMet used some of their mandatory public art money on a temporary installation, printing artsy phrases on some of their construction fencing. I was still trying to be semi-timely about getting posts finished, at least for temporary things like this, and I managed to put together a blog post about Orange Lining: Art Starts Now while some of the fences were still up. Toward the end of that post I mentioned that the project had an upcoming Phase 2 in the works called Impressed Concrete and I was going to hold off posting about it for a while to accumulate more photos. So now you're looking at the promised phase 2 post, over a decade later, and I even accumulated a few more photos over that time.

One fact of life of construction projects west of the Cascades is that if your project will take longer than the month of August or so, your jobsite will be rained on, possibly a lot. So you'll have mud to deal with, as well as runoff water that has to go somewhere, and that water can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't manage it correctly. If there's too much silt in your runoff and it ends up in local streams, it makes the fish sad and angsty and then the EPA fines you for violating the federal Clean Water Act. One very common way to address this is to install silt fencing, which is a sort of synthetic fabric barrier that is supposed to let water through while blocking any soil particles trying to go along for the ride. This supposedly works fairly well, at least when the fencing is installed properly and then maintained regularly (which does not always happen), and most importantly it's potentially cheaper than paying EPA fines. So when the time came to build the TriMet MAX Orange Line down to Milwaukie, the agency was set to buy a large quantity of the stuff.

Separately, the agency had (and has) a longstanding legal requirement to spend some low single-digit percentage of the total project costs on public art projects. This typically means each MAX station gets some sort of whimsical sculpture that amuses kids and perplexes adults. Beyond that, someone put two and two together and realized the miles of orange fabric were a potential blank canvas and figured out how to silkscreen black letters onto the orange background. The public was invited to submit poetic phrases, old sayings, and general aphorisms and whatnot (to a maximum 50 characters) for potential use somewhere along the long orange fence. Which is a lot of trouble to go to just to decorate a temporary fence. Fortunately(?), MAX contractors were also going to need to tear up and rebuild a lot of sidewalks over the course of the project, and pressing letters into freshly poured concrete is cheap and easy, and the practice dates back to at least the ancient Romans. So the effort got a Phase 2, largely reusing the text chosen for the orange silt fences, but reappearing this time as words in the sidewalk.

At one point the project had its own website at OrangeLining.net, and a separate project blog, because that was just how you did social media back then. Those went away ages ago (and the links go to Wayback Machine copies), but Trimet's Orange Line art guide is still online (as of December 2024), and it has this to say about the art:

Buster Simpson and Peg Butler, Orange Lining: Art Starts Now and Impressed Concrete.
Orange polypropylene fencing, concrete

• Public call for writing resulted in selection of 102 poetic phrases.
• Phrases were printed on orange silt fencing and installed temporarily during light rail construction.
• Phrases are stamped into new concrete sidewalks at 122 locations along the alignment.

Before anyone asks: No, I don't have photos of all 122 locations, and no, I'm not taking that on as a new project. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the old OrangeLining.net page with all the inscriptions has been archived for posterity, in case anyone's curious, and tracking them all down in real life is left as an exercise for the reader.