Prowform and Propform

A few photos of Prowform and Propform, a pair of public artworks at the Prescott St. MAX station. Prowform is a construction of tubes and vanes at the north end of the station, designed to sorta-resemble the prow of a ship (allegedly), while Propform is the rusty propeller shape in the nearby "Prescott Biozone". Said biozone is of the region's seemingly endless demonstration projects around trying to mange stormwater in an artsy and upscale sort of way. The city's Bureau of Environmental Services maintains a list of such projects, which describes Prowform and Propform thusly:

Brian Borrello and Valerie Otani, Artists; 2004 These sculptures, inspired by the historical ship building industry on Swan Island, are artful representations of the history of the area, as well as innovative approaches to managing stormwater.

MAX Yellow Line art guide says of the two, "A stainless steel "ship's prow" gathers rainwater and funnels it to a greenspace.", and "A rusted steel propeller sculpture flowers amidst a swirling pattern of grasses."

I'm not sure what the process was for choosing an overall theme for each MAX station. Generally they're supposed to reference the local neighborhood somehow, and they picked the maritime industries of Swan Island for this one. That's a reasonable choice. So far, so good. But they also had to include a positive environmental / educational message about stormwater management, for whatever reason, and figure out how to mash the two ideas together. These two themes don't have any obvious synergies, which may be why we ended up with a pair of nautical-themed downspouts. I'm not sure what else they could have made and still stayed within the prescribed themes, quite honestly.

It's odd that we have an actual genre of stormwater-themed art here. Maybe I'm the only person who thinks that, I dunno. In recent decades the city's Bureau of Environmental Services (the delicately-named sewer agency) has tackled the multi-billion-dollar Big Pipe and other big-ticket capital projects, and the 1% for Art rules apply to them as much as anyone else, so I suppose that makes for a large pot of money to draw from. For that kind of money we could probably have gotten ourselves a giant gold statue of South Park's Mr. Hankey, or maybe some Futurama sewer mutants, but for whatever reason the city prefers art that focuses strictly on the boring rainwater side of their business. Like Prowform and Propform, Eye River near OMSI has a focus on our heroic struggle against the endless, pitiless rains. Memorial Inscription near PSU isn't water-themed itself, but it's part of a mini-plaza that also includes educational displays so college students can learn important truths about the rain, our friend, constant companion, and eternal adversary. Or whatever.

North Denver Plaza

In yesterday's Paul Bunyan post, I mentioned that the rival Paul Bunyan statue at the Trees of Mystery has a Babe, the Blue Ox at his side, and ours doesn't. This is basically true, but when the MAX Yellow Line went in they added a sort of reference to Paul's bovine companion, in another little plaza right across Denver Ave. from Bunyan himself. TriMet's MAX yellow line art guide just says this:

N Denver Plaza
Brian Borrello's seating sculpture was inspired by Babe the Blue Ox.

The "seating sculpture" being four sorta-benches that look like blue hooves. This terse blurb at least names the mini-park and tells us who created the hooves. Turns out he's created several other things that have appeared here before: People's Bike Library of Portland on Burnside, downtown; Lents Hybrids at the Foster Rd. MAX station on the Green Line, and Silicon Forest at the MAX Yellow Line's Rose Quarter station.

So the question remains why we didn't get a blue ox in the first place. The Trees of Mystery has one, and it turns out a shorter Bunyan in Bemidji, Minnesota has a blue ox as well. The Oregonian database never mentions the idea, as far as I can tell, so we're left trying to guess. Obviously the expense and finding a place to put it would've been factors, but the other key thing is that the longtime largest employer in Kenton wasn't the timber industry, but the old Union Stockyards just to the north of here. If beef is what's for dinner, maybe you don't want to go portraying a giant ox as an intelligent, friendly and loyal companion. I can't prove that's the reason, but it makes a much better story than if it just cost too much, or there wasn't room for it, or that building an ox just didn't occur to anyone.

Lents Hybrids

The next stop along the Green Line is the Lents Town Center / Foster MAX station, home to Lents Hybrids:

Brian Borrello's Lents Hybrids is a series of spiraling plant forms with "buds" that generate energy through a hybrid system of wind and solar generators. The pieces are evocative of the native long grasses that may have once grown near the station area, while the buds are symbolic of the unfolding beauty and potential for the Lents neighborhood.

I only managed to capture one of the sets of hybrids while riding by on the train. There's at least one more at the station, with four spiraling stems instead of two. And I didn't do the two-stem one justice either, this being yet another crappy Blackberry photo taken from a moving MAX train.

Borrello also created People's Bike Library of Portland in downtown Portland, Silicon Forest on the MAX Yellow Line, the blue ox feet at the Kenton MAX station, and apparently much, much more, including some giant filberts he's creating for the City of Tigard. Like Lents Hybrids, Silicon Forest is a collection of tall, skinny solar-powered tree structures. Add in More Everyday Sunshine and Nepenthes, and it starts to look like solar-powered art is a hot local trend right now. Or at least it will probably look that way to art historians a century from now.

Neighborhood Notes has a few construction photos. East PDX News has a few more, plus one of the finished product glowing blue at night, which looks kind of cool in a Lothlorien/Vegas sort of way. Lents Grown mentions a second artwork at the MAX station, Out of the Brambles by Wayne Chabre (who also created Connections at the Multnomah County building on Hawthorne). It looks like I would've needed to get off the train in order to see it, though, and even if I'd been in the mood to get off at each stop and look around, TriMet's website neglects to even mention that it's there.

As with Sky to Earth elsewhere on the Green Line, Lents Hybrids was created with help from a local pipe bending company. That sounds kind of esoteric, but their photo galleries showcasing their work are actually pretty interesting. Go take a look if you don't believe me.

Silicon Forest

Here are a few photos of Silicon Forest, the solar powered earth-o-licious tree structures at the Interstate/Rose Quarter MAX station. TriMet's Yellow Line art guide describes it:

Brian Borrello presents a three-part metaphor for displacement and change.

• Illuminated metal trees generate their own electricity from solar panels.
• A virtual campfire flickers with light at night, surrounded by stainless steel stump seats.
• Light filtering through colored glass on shelter roofs simulates the dappled light of a forest.
• Concrete tree rings in the platform symbolize the forest once abundant on the site.
• Custom guardrails feature branching tree limbs and roots.

So it was created by the same guy who created People's Bike Library of Portland, and the blue ox feet at the Kenton MAX stop, and a number of other public art doodads around town that I haven't covered yet. Apparently he designed the entire MAX station, not just the trees, but I didn't realize that at the time and only have photos of the trees.

The usual idea with MAX station art, on any of the various MAX lines, is that it's supposed to be somehow inspired by or related to the surrounding neighborhood. I don't really envy the task here. Today it's just sports arenas and mass transit, and making MAX art about being a MAX hub might be too self-referential even for Portland. Until the early 1960s there was a thriving majority-black neighborhood here, before the bulldozers of urban renewal came and swept it away. That would be an obvious choice for a theme, but the excesses of urban renewal aren't exactly a happy, self-esteem-boosting topic, and TriMet probably wouldn't go for that. Maybe "metaphor for displacement and change" is an oblique reference to the area's history, I'm not really sure.

In any case, the name "Silicon Forest" has been a nickname for the Portland-area tech industry, coined (and trademarked) by Lattice Semiconductor in 1984 and swiftly adopted by local boosters, by analogy with "Silicon Valley". Though a proper pedantic engineer (such as, um, myself) would point out that the industry's westside office parks typically replaced farmland, not forests, technically. We do, at least, have a decent claim on the "Silicon" part of the name, since the design & initial manufacturing of Intel chips happens here. And the Trail Blazers (who play in the nearby Moda Center) are owned by a certain Microsoft mega-billionaire, and Microsoft products generally rely on said Intel chips. As far as I know that's the one tech industry connection to this particular spot in Portland.

People's Bike Library of Portland

At the corner of SW 13th & Burnside is this odd thing: A tall pole topped by a gold child's bicycle, with a bunch of junky kids' bikes chained to the base. This is the People's Bike Library of Portland, a combination art project and bike rack. The official RACC description of it:

The Peoples Bike Library of Portland is a functional bike rack, bike ‘lending’ library, and monument to the vital bike culture of Portland. Erected by artists Brian Borrello and Vanessa Renwick in collaboration with Zoobomb (www.zoobomb.net), an iterative design process led to the current sculpture. An accumulation of small kids’ bicycles are locked to the sculpture, lent to the public for weekly ‘zoobomb’ rides.

A BikePortland article about the grand opening raved about the thing, or at least the symbolic value of the thing. As did a blog post about the event by a visitor from Austin, our compatriot/competitor city in hip urban hipsterdom.

The "bike library" replaced the previous, unofficial pile-o-Zoobomb-bikes at 10th & Oak. There was some sort of muttering about that pile being unsafe or something, but in truth this is just the Portland Way. The city gets to replace an unofficial thing with an official thing, because unofficial things can't be trusted. The people who get the new official thing are flattered, because, I mean, who wouldn't be flattered by the city suddenly spending a bunch of money and endorsing your odd little hobby? Artists get paid, designers get paid, construction people get paid. Obscure bloggers like your humble correspondent have something new to blog about. The end result, ideally, raises property values or helps with the city's "branding", which in turn convinces the Right Sort of People to move here, and maybe lures in some free-spending cosmopolitan European tourists as well. And they all pay taxes, and then we can afford even more urban goodies. And the whole thing becomes a delicious glowing ball of locally-sourced win for everyone.

I'm not disputing the underlying theory, mind you. It seems entirely possible to me that investing in a bit of official bike squee will attract the Right Sort of Person to our fair city, assuming that hipsters and "young creatives" are the Right Sort of People. A shallow theory, but quite possibly an accurate one. The important thing here is that the rain dance works, not that it working makes a lot of sense. And I get the bike thing too: Building even the fanciest bike rack is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a parking garage, and bike lanes are cheaper than freeways. And, ideally, people who've gotten used to a bike lifestyle won't flee to the 'burbs the moment they have kids.

I do think we place too much emphasis on everything needing an official seal of approval from City Hall, though. I keep thinking of times when a holiday's come along (New Years, Mardi Gras, etc.) and the city's neglected to organize an official celebration event. Every time this happens, people show up at Pioneer Courthouse Square and wander around, looking lost & wondering where the city put the party they were supposed to organize. This is probably the same mindset that gives us such a low crime rate for a major US city, but expecting the city to be your party planner is just kind of embarrassing, don't you think?

Couple of minor quibbles though. First, the gold bike on a high pedestal reminds me of the of the golden calf corporate logo in Dogma. But that's just me, probably. More importantly, what happens to the People's Bike Library 20-30 years down the road? It looks fairly permanent, and it's designed to facilitate zoobombing. Is that still going to be popular a few decades from now? If not, is there anything else it can be used for? Or will it just sit there, empty and mysterious, for future bloggers (or whatever the replacement for blogs ends up being) to wonder about? At some point down the road the gold leaf is going to need regilding too. I imagine the city's on the hook for that, but if zoobombing goes the way of roller disco, are they going to bother? As far as we know, in 2043 all the cool kids will get around with giant robot exoskeletons powered by organic hash oil, and they'll sneer at the crappy little-kid bikes their parents were stuck with. I can't prove that won't happen, and neither can you.