Romona Falls

Next up, we're looking at Romona Falls, a sculpture/fountain in VanWa's Turtle Place plaza. The Waymarking page for it (1st link) notes that it was created by artists Greg Conyne and Wendy Armstrong, & includes the text of the plaque attached to it, which I'm shamelessly copying & pasting here:

For this sculpture/fountain the artists reclaimed used but familiar objects from a number of sources and combined them in an entirely new and different context. Old equipment from Clark Public Utilities, C-Tran and the City of Vancouver offer clues to the past expressed in a somewhat nonsensical way.

The rough, rusted and used appearance works well with the elements of the theme: Conserve Reuse Recycle. Seasonal rainwater from the roof of the adjacent building is captured to provide a portion of the falling water. The name "Ramona Falls" recalling a well known site on the slopes of Mount Hood.

As I noted in the earlier Turtle Place post, the plaza has since been torn up and rebuilt as a terminal for Vancouver's new Bus Rapid Transit system (which will open in early January 2017), but supposedly they're keeping the fountain as well as the plaza's giant mural.

As for the fountain's sorta-namesake, here are Wikipedia & Oregon Hikers Field Guide pages about Ramona Falls, since I've somehow neglected to go take my own photos of it yet. I have no idea why the fountain is spelled slightly differently, whether it's an in joke I'm not privy to, or maybe a typo that was caught late in the process & was too expensive to fix. Beats me.

The Three Graces

Next up, we're back at the OHSU campus again, looking at a small fountain called The Three Graces, in the Kohler Pavilion's outdoor sculpture garden. The fountain was created by Oregon artist Bill Kucha, and is dedicated to the late Leonard Schnitzer.

Alumni Fountain, OHSU

Here are a few photos of OHSU's Alumni Fountain, located in the plaza in front of Mackenzie Hall. A plaque at the base explains that it was a gift from the alumni association for the school's 75th anniversary in 1962, and it was designed by architect Lewis Crutcher. The fountain wasn't actually installed until August 1963, though; an Oregonian article about the new fountain proudly noted it was the first new public fountain in the city for over 40 years (and what the previous one might have been doesn't come to mind immediately). The article continues:

Pumps will send a 25-foot gusher into the air, then the water will flow back into the basin through 10 cuts in the upper side of the fountain, so there will be a dual sound. Colored lights will play upon the fountain at night.

The fountain is clearly not sending a 25-foot gusher into the air in these photos. OHSU has some vintage photos of the fountain online, and it was obviously spraying higher in 1968 than it is now. So they must have dialed it back at some point. Looking at the old photos, I suspect you wouldn't have wanted to walk past it on a windy day. I haven't visited the fountain at night, so I have no idea whether the colored lights are still there or not.

I wasn't familiar with Crutcher's work, but the interwebs have a few interesting tidbits. His 2000 obit in the Daily Journal of Commerce is largely devoted to his 1950s campaign against garish billboards and neon signs, cluttered sidewalks, and other civic ugliness. As this was decades before PowerPoint was invented, Crutcher illustrated his campaign with watercolors of European landmarks blanketed with the commercial clutter of 1950s Portland. The February-March 1959 issue of Old Oregon (the UO alumni magazine) [PDF] included an editorial by Crutcher about the many ills of the modern city, illustrated with a few more of these paintings. (Incidentally, his complaint about utility companies' hack-and-slash tree pruning practices is something that hasn't really improved over the last 60-odd years.) The city sign code largely adopted his ideas after a few years, although as fate would have it the few neon signs that survived are now seen as civic treasures to be protected at all costs.

Another aspect of his anti-ugliness campaign has survived the test of time a bit better: At some point, decades earlier, the city had decided that all Portland bridges must be painted black, no exceptions. The Broadway Bridge was black, the Ross Island was black, along with the Hawthorne and all the others. Crutcher had the bright idea that maybe a little variety wouldn't kill us, which led to the range of colors we see today. Except the Steel Bridge, which is owned by a railroad and not the city, and frankly looks like it hasn't been repainted since before the current color scheme went into effect.

Other projects Crutcher was involved in included restoration work at Skidmore Fountain Plaza and the Railway Exchange Block (which is currently being transmogrified into yet another boutique hotel), and the design of Memorial Coliseum. As an architecture student in the 1940s, he designed the houses for an early desegregated subdivision in Claremont, CA, which are now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Essential Forces

Our next adventure takes us back to Portland's Rose Quarter, home to sports arenas, MAX trains, and very little else. I've done a few posts about the art scattered around the area, but I haven't yet done a post about Essential Forces, the signature fountain at the south end of the complex. This is because the fountain is almost never running, so it's nearly impossible to get photos of it doing its thing, and I usually feel like that's important when doing a post about a fountain. The fountain has 500 computer-controlled valves that spit out bursts of water on command, and two large pillars that can optionally spew fire. It all seems very Vegas and not very Portland, so it's not surprising that the fountain was created by LA-based WET Design, the company behind the world-famous Bellagio Fountain. The company created a few other fountains around Vegas that have appeared here too, like the Glacia, Halo, Lumia, and Focus fountains at CityCenter.

I gather that the fountain is so elusive in part because it's rather delicate. The Portland Tribune included it in a 2007 list of broken things around town:

Essential Forces, built in 1995, has 500 shooters or valves, and when one malfunctions they all have to be tested, like fixing old Christmas tree lights. There is no set date but he said it should be up and running again 'before the warm weather arrives.'

That list doesn't even mention the fire pillars, which were out of commission for close to a decade until they were repaired in 2014. Rose Quarter management started talking about bringing back the fire theatrics about a year ago, but only as a maybe-someday item. Then the whole Rose Quarter underwent major renovations over summer 2014, and they fixed the fountain as part of that effort. I'm told the arena food has improved, too.

The other part of the problem (at least for me) is that they appear to only run it for Trailblazers home games, and then only if the weather isn't too cold, which leaves brief windows in the fall and late spring when it might be operating, assuming it's in working order. I'm not really a big basketball fan, so it's never going when I'm there. I've lost track of how many times I've gone by to see if it's running, and it just never is. So I finally decided I'd just go with the photos I had; I've reached my limit for how much I'm willing to invest in this particular blog post. One of the photos shows a little water gurgling up through one of the valves, so I do technically have a photo of water coming out of it, and that's just going to have to be enough. Strangely enough, one time several years ago I did take a video clip of it running, but my phone's internal SD card promptly became corrupted before I could upload anything, so it's possible I've already squandered my one and only chance to see it in action. Unless maybe I happen into some free tickets somehow, and they're for an evening when I don't already have plans. In any case, I did find a short Instagram video clip from the official Moda Center account showing it running back in September. So at least I found some evidence that it operated for at least 10-15 seconds a few months ago, unless maybe they CGI'd the whole thing or something.

The fountain was unveiled as part of an exclusive VIP bash for the new arena in October 1995. Tickets cost $125 per person, but came with all sorts of goodies:

Comedian Dana Carvey will perform a stand-up routine to top the evening's program, which also includes an arena tour, live music, food from the arena restaurants, a chance to shoot baskets on the new basketball court and skate on the new ice surface. All that, and the debut of the fire-and-water fountain, Essential Forces. The program runs from 8 p.m. to midnight.

Recall that this was back during the Michael Jordan era, a time when basketball had a reasonable claim on being the country's real national pastime. Nike's basketball shoe business was booming. The movie Space Jam came out the next year, starring Jordan and various Warner Brothers characters. Off the top of my head I can't think of any contemporary athlete in any sport who would be a similar box office draw today. Things went south for the Blazers just a few years after this, culminating in the infamous "Jail Blazers" years. One local blogger recently suggested adding a Rasheed Wallace plaque to the fountain to commemorate his all-time record for technical fouls in a season, a record that may very well stand for all time.

I've mentioned the Essential Forces fountain in passing before, in a very early post from January 2006, back when I still had a fresh supply of snark. I was pretty thrilled when Alt.portland linked here. The fountain also got a brief (and unfavorable) mention in a Portland Public Art post, contrasting it with the Holladay Park sculptures & fountain. (If you ask me, a more striking contrast would be this fountain versus the World War II Memorial & Fountain next door at Memorial Coliseum). Portland Public Art went on hiatus in April 2009, and Alt.portland has been on "extended hiatus" since 2010, and somehow I'm still going. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Vaillancourt Fountain

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Here's an old photo of San Francisco's modernist Vaillancourt Fountain, in a plaza along the Embarcadero across from the Ferry Building. You can tell this is an old photo because of the Embarcadero Freeway lurking in the background. This was taken a couple of years after the big Loma Prieta earthquake that damaged the old freeway, and the city was in the very early stages of tearing it out. If you look closely you can see construction equipment on the lower deck of the freeway.

The one thing everyone seems to know about this fountain is that it was vandalized by U2's Bono during a concert in 1987. I actually liked them at the time, but I still thought it was a dumb stunt. It looks even worse with a few decades of hindsight, as Bono's aged into a pretentious celebrity buffoon (who hasn't had a decent album since 1993's Zooropa). First he vandalizes a fountain, then he comes and dumps his new album on your iPod without even asking.

Waterfall Fountain, Pioneer Courthouse Square

Here's a slideshow and a Vine clip of the "waterfall fountain" in Pioneer Courthouse Square, lining the entrance to the underground Visitors Center (previously a TriMet ticket booth and lost-and-found office). If you come across old photos of the fountain, you'll notice that it was once clad in a gaudy checkerboard of purple and blue tiles. I'm not sure when these were removed, but they looked like bathroom tile -- dated bathroom tile -- and the fountain looks better without them. The transcript of a lecture by Will Martin, the square's designer, has a bit about the design of the fountain and how it fit into the square's overall 1980s-Roman look.

The element you see in front of you, the generation of that came from fallen Roman art, but it’s totally modified. The elements you see on each side are what we would call a Boussioure, the big stones that make up this huge arch. The lectern in the middle is still a symbol of the keystone, but it is also electric, so it has a double kind of connotation. The fallen arch is also a fountain. Imagine the interpretation of a collapsed classical ruin that’s been sitting in an area for 500 years and there’s spring water welling up underneath it and the water runs over the rocks and it has all this wonderful vegetation, so it’s a very romantic idea.

[inaudible question]

Sure. The slots is where the water comes out - we’ll get a little closer if you have a minute, and I apologize for its ragged look, it isn’t finish yet. They have a lot of grouting to do yet and some tile to replace. They’ve been replacing some of the metal mouths inthese things, because they’re not level, so there’s a lot of work to be done. But it also provides an entryway, it’s the focal point to the square and it’s the main front door to the level of [inaudible]. We call it lower level, don’t refer to it as a basement, it’s not a basement. It is on grade with the square. We have nineteen feet of grade [inaudible. Really the only competitors of [inaudible] capturing about 17,000 square feet of usable space down below. A lot of that will be leasable to help finance the support of this thing.

So my head wasn’t all in the stars, it was also in the cash register. So, TriMet already has the corner, and we’ve got other leases in place down here. We’ve got a lot of storage over on the right and so on. We can talk about that later, but this column symbolic arch is also the front door. We have a pool of shallow water in which kids can play. I hope they get ducks and [inaudible].

...

[inaudible question]

The fountain was a recycled water system. The pumps on both sides underneath the fountain, it also ties the water in the water channels and gets the water in the [inaudible]. It’s all filtered and recycled There’s some make-up water naturally, it needs some for evaporation and all that, but it is truly economical.

PSU Urban Plaza Fountains

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Here are a few photos of the trio of fountains in the PSU Urban Plaza, on the Portland State campus at SW 5th & Montgomery. Two of the three fountains are sort of tilted aqueduct structures, with water flowing off of both the low and high ends. Water runs down to the low ends and then off, and the design suggests to the viewer that water also flows flows uphill and off the high end as well. Obviously that's not what's actually going on, but at a casual glance it kind of looks that way. The planters next to the fountains are a later circa-2011 addition, part of the city's endless handwringing about stormwater management.

A 2010 PSU Vanguard article questioned whether all the fountains around the campus were really worth the expense. (The others include Farewell to Orpheus on the Park Blocks, and the tiny one outside the Student Health Center.) Apparently the Urban Plaza fountains are prone to leaks and mechanical breakdowns, and the university's fountains cost as much as $300,000 per fountain per year to maintain. (This is on top of the initial construction costs; the marble for the fountain alone ran around $400k).

The fountains were officially renamed in 2012 in honor of the late Joyce N. Furman, a local philanthropist who had given generously to the university over the years. Or at least one of the three fountains was renamed; I wasn't sure the name applies to all three, so I went with the older generic name as a post title. The sign in the plaza says "fountain", singular, so it's possible the other two are being reserved for equally generous future donors. It would be unlike PSU to pass up a naming rights opportunity like that.

McCoy Fountain

Here are a couple of video clips of the fountain in North Portland's McCoy Park, near the corner of Trenton St. & Newman Avenue, once again showing why I won't be winning any Oscars anytime soon. It's your basic fun-for-the-kids water jet fountain, which is an increasingly popular thing now that the state health authorities frown on public wading pools. A fountain guide from the Parks Bureau (which took over the city's fountains from the Water Bureau a few years ago) has a brief description of it:

Built in 2006, McCoy Fountain was designed by Murase Associates. It is the first decorative municipal fountain in north Portland. The playful water feature sits at the south end of McCoy Park in the New Columbia neighborhood. The Housing Authority of Portland, master developer of New Columbia and McCoy Park, commissioned the fountain for people of all ages to enjoy. McCoy Fountain is located across from housing for seniors and adjacent to the neighborhood grocery store and coffee house.

It recirculates nearly 8,000 gallons of water. Water spouts at random intervals at heights of up to 6 feet from 35 jets. It's a "guessing" fountain - people guess which spouts will erupt next in the 710-sq-ft oval area bounded by seating ledges.

St. Francis Park Fountain

Some time ago, I posted some photos of SE Portland's St. Francis Park, a small and rather run-down park owned by the adjacent Catholic church. One of the things that made it seem especially decrepit was the park's old fountain, which sat dry and abandoned in the middle of the park. I think there were even weeds growing in it. It hadn't run for many years and I just assumed it was broken, but some time in the last few weeks they turned it back on and have been running it regularly. I heard about this on the net somewhere and went to check it out, and took photos and a short video clip. A number of other people were there just watching it, like it was something they'd never expected to see either.

It's a fairly elaborate water feature. The water flows out of a low steel sculpture by Bruce West, cascading into a small pool. From there an artificial stream burbles downhill to a lower pool, with some rustic wood bridge structures around it. The video clip follows the water backwards from the lower pool.

The odd thing about this is the timing. The church just announced a plan to tear out the park and replace it with an affordable housing complex. Neighborhood groups aren't thrilled by the idea, and are looking for options that would keep the park in place. So why run the fountain now? Maybe they're open to selling it to the city instead, and maybe they're showing off the fountain to help gin up some interest in the idea, or boost the selling price a bit. Or maybe it's just to see what condition the park's current plumbing is in before they go tearing it up. I dunno. My sentiments here are similar to what I said about the "Fountain for a Rose" in O'Bryant Square: If the park has to to go away or be completely redone, I hope they'd at least keep the fountain around. If not in place, at least relocate it somewhere else.

Gold Award Garden Fountain

Our next adventure takes us back to the Rose Garden in Washington Park, and once again we aren't looking at flowers. I was at the Rose Garden a few months ago taking photos for a couple of art posts (the Shakespeare relief, the Currey bench, and the Royal Rosarian statue), in the non-flowering off season to avoid the crowds. One of the garden's various sections is a "Gold Award Garden", a collection of past grand champion award-winning roses, some dating back to 1919. As I walked by, I noticed there was a little fountain among the non-blooming celebrity roses, so I took a few photos of it, along with a Vine clip to show the fountain running.

The garden only dates to 1969-1970, when local high society people (a.k.a. the sort of people who worry about these things) decided the rose garden wasn't doing a proper job of preserving past winners for posterity, and after various fancy-dress luncheons and fundraiser galas the whole thing came together. Newspaper accounts from that time just mention the fountain in passing, which I guess makes sense. The Rose Society's page about the garden (linked above) just says "Dorothy knew this needed an expert for design and layout and she chose what she considered the best. The board agreed with her Selection of Wallace Kay Huntington noted landscape architect to design the Gold Award Garden." Huntington is a prominent architect and architectural historian, and he was still consulting with local architecture firms as of a few years ago.

Walker Park, Honolulu

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Today's adventure takes us to tiny Walker Park, near the waterfront at the edge of downtown Honolulu, at the intersection of Queen St. & Fort St. It's a small plaza built around a fountain, with an abstract sculpture at its center. There's also an ornate gate, and an old cannon. The caption to a wallyg Flickr photo of the park explains that the park dates to 1951, and is a bit of land left over after widening & realignment of Nimitz Highway & Queen St. It's dedicated to the memory of H. Alexander Walker Sr., longtime president and chairman of American Factors, Inc. (later Amfac), a Hawaiian sugar company and one of the "Big Five" corporations that essentially controlled the state during the sugar cane era.

The park's Walker Fountain dates to 1972. The central sculpture Puna (by Hawaii sculptor Sean Browne) was added in 1991, in memory of Una Craig Walker, wife of the park's namesake. (I'd rather think of them as co-namesakes of the park, but apparently that's not how things worked back in 1951.) The caption to a second photo explains the wrought iron gate. It stood in front of American Factors company headquarters from 1902 to 1972, when it was moved here. I didn't notice this at the time, but apparently the park also has a few blocks remaining from the original Liberty House department store, which once stood nearby and was razed in 1979.

I'm not sure what the story is with the park's cannon. A blog post I ran across speculates that it might be from the old Honolulu Fort, which was located here from 1818-1857 (and was the site of a short-lived French invasion in 1849). If it's not an original cannon, it's probably at least a nod to that period of history.

A historic inventory from the Hawaii Culture & Arts District (a local nonprofit) describes the history of the old fort:

Description: Fort Street takes its name from a one-time defensive work located at the present intersection of Queen Street and Fort Street. The Honolulu Fort originated with the Russian-American Company blockhouse. Directed by the German adventurer Georg Schaffer (1779-1836), they built their blockhouse near the harbor, probably against the ancient heiau of Pakaka and close to the king’s palace. Pakaka was an important sacred site for Ku, the Hawaiian war-god and a place of great symbolic and ritual importance to the victorious King Kamehameha. Hearing about this development, Kamehameha I, the king, ordered his advisor Kalinimoku to take a contingent of Hawaiian soldiers to Honolulu and press the Russians to leave. Threatened by a large number of Hawaiians, the Russians quickly abandoned their blockhouse and sailed for Kauai, where they had earlier attempted to start a trading post and soon built another fort. Kamehameha I appropriated the fort and it protected Honolulu harbor and also housed a number of administrative functions, including many years of service as Honolulu’s prison. Created first in 1951 as a product of the widening of Nimitz Highway by the city of Honolulu, Walker Park received new attention in the aftermath of the construction of the Amfac Financial Center in 1968-71. At that time the company, through its president, Henry A. Walker, Jr., contributed to the enhancement of the earlier park through the donation of the paved walkway, benches, sculpture and the wrought and the historic cast and wrought iron sign and gateway that serves as a centerpiece of the park.

Anecdote: The The first capital punishment carried out at the fort was the hanging of Chief Kamanawa (c.1785-1840) and his accomplice Lonoapuakau on October 20, 1840. The Hawaiian Court found him guilty of poisoning his wife Kamokuiki, carried out Kamanawa to avoid a charge of adultery. Kamanawa was the grandson of one of Kamehameha I’s principal advisors, Kameeiamoku, and the grandfather of David Kalakaua, later King Kalakaua. The execution took place on the scaffold set up just inside the fort’s main gate. It attracted 10,000 viewers, all of whom watched solemnly as the Governor carried out the sentence.

Honolulu is in the early stages of building a light rail transit system, which will eventually run on elevated tracks somewhere near Walker Park. Several lawsuits were filed attempting to stop the project; in one of the cases, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed an amicus curiae asserting that the raised trackway would block important views from the park and a few other locations, and obstruct views of the historic Aloha Tower. The city's own 2008 evaluation of the park in preparation for the light rail project had concluded that it was technically eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but really wasn't all that significant of a place in itself. As of May 2014 the city has fended off the various lawsuits, and construction is proceeding, with completion expected in 2019.

Brewer Fountain, Boston Common

Couple of photos of the Brewer Fountain in Boston Common, an ornate 19th century concoction that was recently restored to working order. There was a little stand next to it encouraging people to slow down and sit and read one of the free books, and more than a few people had taken them up on the offer. I'm not sure that would work in Portland. Maybe if you stocked it with graphic novels, so long as they're the cool kind, whatever that is.

Wikipedia says there are at least sixteen other copies of this fountain around the world, including ones in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. I occasionally go on about doing a project around visiting every copy of something or other. The Fremiet Joan of Arc would involve a lot of traveling around France, plus trips to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which would be ok. The itinerary for The Ideal Scout would spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering around rural Pennsylvania, which is less of a welcome prospect. Visiting the Brewer Fountain's siblings would be one of the better trips; a page about another copy in Tacna, Peru lists additional known copies in Australia, Chile, Quebec City, Liverpool, four around France, two in Lisbon, and others in Geneva and Valencia. So that sounds like it would be ok, so far as silly projects go.

This fountain dates back to a time when all fountains were expected to come encrusted with mythological characters; cherubs, naiads, mermen, and whatnot. I was going to propose a glib theory that this was because running water was a rare and precious novelty back then, and fountains got the mythology treatment because they were a very big deal. I'm not sure this checks out though. The fountain went live in 1868, and Boston's first waterworks dates all the way back to 1652, over two centuries earlier, so I'm not sure the chronology lines up on this idea. It's also possible this mythological stuff was simply the fashion for a while, and eventually people tired of it and went on to do something else instead.

lovejoy fountain (2014 edition)

Beverly Cleary Fountain & Sculpture Garden

In NE Portland's Grant Park, there's a small plaza with trio of statues of characters from Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, which were set in the surrounding neighborhood. In the summer months there's also a small fountain here, I guess for kids to play in; it wasn't running when I stopped by, but someone posted a YouTube video of it taken last summer. The whole assemblage was created by Lee Hunt, who also created the Human Comedy terra-cotta faces on a building at 3rd & Yamhill downtown.

I admit I never read any of the Ramona books as a kid, and it's a bit late to do so now, but I understand they're a fond childhood memory for a lot of people. So I can't speak to what scene from which book this is, or whether the characters look the way the books describe them.

The problem here (which is one I've discussed before) is that statues of kids are always creepy. Or at least they always look creepy in photos. I think it might be the facial expressions; Statues of presidents, generals, prominent local businessmen, etc., can pose their subjects gazing nobly into the middle distance, boldly leading us into the future or something. With kids you can't really do that, so they're often pictured laughing and smiling, and that doesn't translate into bronze as well. Whatever the cause, statues of kids always seem to evoke the "uncanny valley" effect, the same reason creepy clowns and ventriloquist dummies are so unsettling. I swear they didn't look this creepy in person, maybe because you can see they're child-sized and nonthreatening and not at all Chucky-like. Or at least not Chucky-like during daytime. At night it's anyone's guess.

Enchanting Garden

Today's adventure takes us back to downtown Honolulu again, once again to the intersection of Bishop & King Streets. This is the heart of Honolulu's financial district, and on each corner of the intersection a big bank or insurance company has installed some prestige art. It always seems kind of silly when CEOs compete over who's got the biggest, uh, sculpture, but all things considered I'd rather have them compete over art than over how many jobs they can offshore to Bangladesh or something. In any case, I've already covered Sun Disc, Upright Motive #9, and Na Manu Nu Oli, and today's post completes the set. Enchanting Garden is yet another sculpture-fountain combo, this time outside the First Hawaiian Center office block. It's by local sculptor Satoru Abe and -- surprisingly -- only dates to 1997, same as the building itself. They really fit in with the 1960s modernist look the rest of the area has. I don't know if this was deliberate, or whether the Jet Age International Style is the local vernacular and creating more of it is just automatic at this point.

I unfortunately don't have a lot of material to share about Enchanting Garden. It seems there's an entirely different Enchanting Garden at Honolulu's McKinley High School, also by Abe but dating to 1983. They don't even look all that similar. Pretty much all the search results I can find are for the 1983 one and not the one pictured here. So artists, a plea from a humble blogger: Could you try not reusing titles? Or if you really have to, could you at least maybe number them or something? That would be great.

Upright Motive #9

It's time for more art from downtown Honolulu. This is Upright Motive #9 (1979-81) by Henry Moore, in a little plaza at the corner of Bishop St. & King St. If you read this humble blog obsessively and never read anything else about art, you might still be familiar with Moore's work thanks to his Reclining Connected Forms at CityCenter in Las Vegas. Who says going to Vegas isn't educational?

This is the ninth design in Moore's Upright Motive series, and the Honolulu one is one of six copies of Upright Motive #9. There's another at Moore's estate in rural Hertfordshire, UK, now an outdoor museum, and a third one at an outdoor sculpture park in Kansas City. I'm not sure where the other three are.

For the sake of comparison, here are a few other entries in the long-running Upright Motive series, which Moore began in the mid-1950s: One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Twelve. There's also a series with letters instead of numbers, so here are editions B, C, and D, as well.

Hawaiian Netmender - Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena

Here's another blog post based around a couple of photos I took from a Honolulu city bus. I was riding back from downtown to my hotel, and we were at a traffic light at the busy intersection of King St. & Kapiolani Boulevard. (This is about a block past where I took my from-the-bus photos of Skygate, by the way.) The intersection forms a little triangle of land in the middle, and the triangle is landscaped as a sort of rock grotto with a statue and fountain. This is Hawaiian Netmender - Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena, which the city's Office of Culture and the Arts page describes thusly:

A Sculpture by Charles Watson. Seated figure of a male with a net draped across his outstretched legs. His arms extend over the net, as he is in the act of mending it. He holds a tool in his proper right hand. The figure sits on a natural boulder which is placed in a man-made pool. There are waterfalls behind the figure as part of a landscaped fountain. Located at the triangle park at King Street and Kapiolani Boulevard.

Watson (a local Hawaii sculptor) also created Tree, outside the Foster Botanical Garden, and several other public artworks around the city. Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena is about 15 years newer than Tree, and there's no obvious resemblance between the two. If I hadn't known, I wouldn't have guessed the connection.

The statue and surrounding park merited a stop on the state government's "Capitol District Public Art & Historic Places Walking Tour". It's kind of an odd combo, featuring several pivotal locations in Hawaiian history alongside (often fairly mundane) public art generally dating to the 1960s and 1970s. Although the more I think about it, that's pretty much exactly the kind of walking tour you'd come up with by stringing a bunch of my blog posts together. So it's probably bad mojo to snark about their guide too much.

Na Manu Nu Oli

The intersection of Bishop & King streets in downtown Honolulu is the core of the city's financial district. At each corner of the intersection is a tall 1960s or 70s-era skyscraper belonging to some giant local bank or insurance company. As was the international custom of that era, each tower sports some abstract art out front. I think this was supposed to demonstrate that the bank was rich and powerful enough to patronize the arts on a grand scale, and forward-thinking enough to pop for the cutting-edge abstract stuff. Some institutions went for internationally famous sculptors, while others preferred to go with prominent local artists. Today's example is one from the latter category.

The tower at 1000 Bishop St. (the former Bishop Trust Company building) is home to Na Manu Nu Oli, a sculpture and fountain by the late Hawaii artist Bumpei Akaji. His Wikipedia bio explains:

In 1943 he joined the United States Army and was sent to Italy with the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He was inspired by the artwork in Florence and received a discharge in Italy. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and at the Academia de Belle Arti, Brera, in Milan on a Fulbright Scholarship.

That sounds like the plot of a good indie Sundance-friendly action movie. Except that the film industry's still allergic to casting Asian-American actors in leading roles, because apparently they weren't CC'd on the "It's 2014, Guys" memo. So maybe someday.

I don't have a lot to pass along about Na Manu Nu Oli itself; I did run across a recent doctoral dissertation about the sculptor George Tsutakawa (who designed dozens of midcentury fountains, including one that once graced Portland's Lloyd Center mall). The paper mentions Akaji and Na Manu Nu Oli in passing; it seems that it and Tsutakawa's Waiola Fountain arrived around the same time in 1970, and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's art critic much preferred the Tsutakawa fountain. Na Manu Nu Oli (which translates as "Birds of Glad Tidings") was criticized for its repetitious bird forms and its overly complex system of water jets. He may have had a point about the water jets, but I quite like the bird forms, repetitious or not.

Birds on a Wire

Here are a couple of photos of Birds on a Wire, the kinetic water sculpture on SE Water Ave. across the street from OMSI. The building in these photos is part of a PGE electrical substation, and the art here is the collection of pipes near the top of the building. The pipes fill with water, from internal piping that you can't see here, and a certain fill level unbalances them, and they tip over and empty into a pool below (which you also can't see, due to a relatively recent wall around the substation). I would have taken a video to give a better idea of what happens, but it never seems to be running when I'm there.

OMSI has an info page about the fountain, which appears to have been created for the 1995-96 "Water Works" exhibit and not updated since then. I think the exhibit overlapped a little with the years I worked there, if I remember correctly, and that was a long, long time ago. I know I recognize some of the names in the site credits, anyway. If you like the Space Jam movie website, or you miss Geocities, you'll love OMSI's Water Works pages. Anyway, the page about Birds on a Wire has a couple of video clips of it doing its thing. Unfortunately as a circa-1995 website the video clips are postage stamp-sized QuickTime movies, but they're the only ones I've been able to find of the fountain in operation. In case the OMSI site goes away, here's their description of the fountain:

This water sculpture is a popular attraction at OMSI. Finished in 1995 by David Curt Morris, this fountain is very similar to the Deer Chaser fountain, but on a larger scale. Large metal pipes move in rythmic motions that remind one of birds drinking from a fountain.

A 2001 profile of Morris for the Reed College alumni magazine mentions that he also created the Columbia River Crystal sculpture in downtown portland, which I'm a big fan of. It and Birds on a Wire look nothing alike, and I wouldn't have guessed the connection on my own. A 1994 First Thursday blurb in the Oregonian, for a show at the Laura Russo Gallery, mentions the fountain in passing:

New York artist David Curt Morris is an architect with a predilection for water and engineering. The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry considered him the perfect person to create a sculpture for its new facility. That piece will be completed in 1994, but in the meantime his studio work made of bronze, glass and water is on view at the gallery. Morris is the son of Carl and Hilda Morris, the late Portland artists.

Morris is a common surname, of course, so I would't have guessed this connection on my own either, but Hilda Morris created Ring of Time, the abstract sculpture outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings that looks either like the Guardian of Forever or an onion ring, depending on how nerdy and/or hungry you are. I'm fond of it too, and I had no idea there was a family connection here.

In any case, another profile, for a gallery in Beijing, mentions that Birds on a Wire won an award for excellence by a local engineering society. Details of the award don't seem to be online; it's possible the engineering society didn't have a website yet back in 1994 or 1995. The 1994 date in the Oregonian article might be when it was originally supposed to be done, by the way; my recollection is that it took quite a few months to get the bugs and kinks worked out of it. But then, I wasn't personally involved in the project and mostly just heard office gossip about it, and it was quite a long time ago, and I may be misremembering the whole thing. The more I think about it, this entire 1994-95 business is making me feel old. Have I mentioned I have yet another birthday in a few days? Because I do, and this time I don't have tickets to Hawaii or Vegas or anywhere. Sigh.

Centennial Fountain, St. Helens

A couple of photos of the Centennial Fountain at the waterfront in St. Helens, Oregon, built in 1989 in honor of the city's 100th birthday. The town actually dates to 1847, but they didn't get around to incorporating for another forty years. Not shown in these photos are a time capsule at the base of the fountain, and a huge flagpole a few feet away, which I think was behind me when I took these.

So yeah, it's a goofy looking piece of folk art, and it's all puffed up with red-state patriotism, the usual frothy mix of war and religion. The plaque even references a bible verse, so legally the city would probably have to let other religions contribute monuments too, thanks to that pesky First Amendment thingy the ACLU keeps going on about. The fountain doesn't even have anything to say about the city, or the centennial it's supposed to be honoring. And the plaque says something about the flagpole flying an enormous 50 foot by 30 foot flag; I'm fairly certain the one it actually flies it much smaller. Plus the correct dimensions of a US flag are supposed to be 10:19, not 3:5, so a 30 foot tall flag should be 57 feet wide, not 50. Yes, I was a Cub Scout once, why do you ask? Normally I wouldn't care, but if you're trying to demonstrate how hyper-patriotic you are, you should really make an effort to get the fundamentals right.

All that said, there's something strangely appealing about it. It's just so damn sincere. It wears its heart on its sleeve. They didn't go out and hire a professional artist or architect, someone who would've created something a bit more tasteful and centennial-oriented. Instead they rounded up local donations and volunteers and cobbled this fountain together as best they could. So I imagine the end result is an accurate reflection of local values and priorities circa 1989. If nothing else, it's a historical artifact, in a way.