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.

South Terminus

Next up we're visiting downtown Portland's "South Terminus", the little park/plaza at the south end of the downtown transit mall, where the MAX Green Line turns around and the Yellow Line becomes the Orange Line (and vice versa). The most notable feature of the place, from a distance, is a tall curved steel structure seen in most of the photos above, which exists to hide (and keep people out of) an electrical substation. The inner workings of it are further concealed by a fence and something called "coil drapery", and (most importantly) the south-facing side of the structure is covered in solar panels, which contribute a purely symbolic amount of electricity toward running the train.

North of all that, there's the actual turnaround area, which takes up most of the block and is just utilitarian train tracks and gravel. And because MAX trains have the turning radius of, well, trains, there was a crescent of land left over inside the loop, which became a small brick plaza and landscaped garden.

All of this was originally built in 2009 for the Green Line, and then "completed" in 2012, and reworked a bit in 2015 for the Orange Line, and further redesigned in 2017 for reasons we'll get to in a moment. If you're familiar with my ongoing projects and occasional obsessions here, you'd think I would have had a post up about it the day it opened, but no. I didn't even pay very close attention as it changed repeatedly over time.

The original design firm behind the project still has a project page up bragging about it, and -- to be fair -- the project got all sorts of rave reviews when the Green Line opened, like a 2009 Architect's Newspaper article, a breathless Oregonian article from January 2010, a similar Avada article, and a 2010 issue of FORM magazine. Though I should note that all of this publicity came even though the solar energy part of the project wouldn't be ready for another two years.

One of the selling points behind their design was, we're told, that "the solar panels identify both Portland and TriMet as leaders in sustainability". Solar project finally opened in 2012 and proved to be a bit controversial. Different articles tell us it either produces around 65,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or 67,000 kilowatts per year, depending on who's reporting and how much they know about electricity. Which is not a lot of power given what they paid for the system (although it cost less than half the original projections thanks to price drops for solar gear). Projections at the time were that the system would pay for itself in about 65 years, though a TriMet spokesman insisted it would be more like 22.5 years, which would mean it's over halfway paid for at this point, which is nice, I guess.

The original plan here was a bit more ambitious and would have augmented the trickle of solar power with a trickle of wind power from 22 little fun-sized wind turbines atop the power poles. Unfortunately(?) the startup that was chosen to build these Little Windmills That Could couldn't get the job done and the whole firm cratered shortly afterward. At that point the idea was quietly dropped.

At one point there was a bench somewhere in the park/plaza area with a builtin LED display so visitors could monitor the system's power output as electricity dribbled out of it. I vaguely remember seeing it, but it's not there now. I can only guess at the timeline but I imagine it was damaged beyond repair by bored vandals shortly after it went in, and then quietly removed during the next renovation, since that's what always happens around here. Or at least it's what always happens in public spaces when you don't give "normies" any reason to spend time there.

I do have a proposal here: At whatever point they redesign the park again, my suggestion would be to divert some of the plaza's solar bounty to power a wireless charging station. To me, charging your phone from those solar panels right over there makes for a much better demonstration than just watching LED numbers tick over in electrical units almost nobody really has a feel for. You might ask why, if that's really such a great idea, why didn't they build it that way in the first place? That's actually an easy one: The project was designed prior to 2009, and wireless charging was still a wacky sci-fi idea back then, shelved next to flying cars and atomic jetpacks. By early 2012 the technology had advanced from "works in the lab" to "getting hyped at CES", but a lot of ideas get hyped at trade shows but never ship in volume, much less catch on with the public. The first phones supporting the new Qi power standard finally shipped in September of that year.

There was also an online version of that power meter, so you could watch your tax dollars at work without getting off your couch, if you were so inclined. The site continued on for years, long after its brick-and-mortar version was hauled away. But it's gone now, because if you were designing a hip, fancy, cutting-edge website in 2009-2012, chances are you built it in Adobe Flash, the powerful full-featured programming language of the future. Over time that consensus shifted to "Flash is insecure and unfixable", and it was officially discontinued in all major browsers on New Years Eve 2021, thus breaking the site. Maybe somebody who cares enough will go back fix it at some point, but I wouldn't bet money on that. Old websites that survive in the long term usually do so by being very low maintenance, like the Space Jam and Mars Pathfinder sites, both from 1996.

All in all, the solar thing was exactly the sort of project Republicans have in mind when they sneer at people for "virtue signaling". But that's a bit unfair in this case; the idea is not to radiate civic virtue directly, but to persuade rich Californians to invest in luxury real estate here, thus boosting the local tax base and (in theory) paying for future civic virtue that way.

There was also a small piece of land left over that they couldn't use for turning around, as it was inside the minimum turning radius of any MAX car, so it became sort of a public mini-garden. also I could swear there used to be public access into the landscaped area. A page at Kavanagh Transit Photos confirms my memory of this, showing what the place looked like in 2009 when it was new. No fence around the place then.

We get a hint of the issues facing the park in a September 2013 nuisance complaint, which asserted the plaza was full of tall grass and weeds and animal feces at that point, which seems accurate if memory serves.

Like a lot of people who take up gardening as a hobby, after a few years of it TriMet evidently realized it couldn't keep up with the watering and weeding and in 2017 hired another landscaping firm to rework the design into something a bit more low-maintenance. Their page says, diplomatically, that nearby construction killed a lot of the original plants here. The page says something about designing a fence to keep people out during construction, maybe it became permanent at that point. The signs around the area say "Limited Access" rather than the usual "No Trespassing" or "No Public Access". I'm not really sure what "Limited Access" means here. It's an unfamiliar bit of officialese and I'm not sure how to interpret it. Maybe it's still officially open and there just aren't any entrances anymore. Maybe you're only allowed in on group tours, which are offered once every other decade.

Oh, and before all of this, there was a circa-1900 house here. It wasn't on the National Register of Historic Places, but was on the city's historic inventory as of 2002 (mentioned in some of the paperwork around moving the Simon Benson House, a National Register property) A little searching came back with a photo of that house, from an interesting Rose City Transit page about what various MAX stations looked like before they were MAX stations.

Kerf

Here are a few photos of Kerf, a pair of huge concrete rings at the SE Tacoma/Johnson Creek MAX station. It was (or they were?) created by artist Thomas Sayre for TriMet's Orange Line, and the Orange Line public art guide describes them briefly:

Two landmark sculptures, “earth-cast” on site, represent the influence of wheels on the area, from a 19th-century sawmill on Johnson Creek to the wheels of the MAX train.

By "earth-cast", they mean casting concrete onsite, in a Kerf-shaped hole in the ground, without the use of the usual wooden forms. This technique gives the concrete a sort of rough natural look, and it was the subject of Earthcaster, a 2016 documentary from North Carolina Public Broadcasting about Sayre and his work, including the creation of Kerf here.

But what if there's more to it than that? This spot is a major transit hub, with a lot of TriMet buses, the Springwater trail, US 99E (McLoughlin Blvd.), and even the Union Pacific line that Amtrak uses on its way to and from California. (It doesn't actually stop here, but in theory it could someday.) So it seems only logical to round things out with a couple of stargates, like in that one movie.

So in theory you could step through one of the Kerves here and pop out of Ring of Time or the Carwash Fountain, both along the downtown transit mall, or Big Pipe Portal on Swan Island, or possibly Arch with Oaks out in Beaverton. Sounds pretty amazing, if you ask me. The only problem being that this system isn't actually open to the general public right now, and TriMet officially denies all knowledge of any such thing being in the works. Maybe they're still quietly working out bugs in the system, or trying to bring down operating costs. Or maybe they're done with that part and are slogging thru federal bureaucracy now, trying to determine whether a stargate is considered an airport, a highway, or a railroad for regulatory purposes; whether each stargate needs a US Customs office, if there's no way to prevent international arrivals, that sort of thing.

International arrivals are certainly possible, by the way. A quick scan of the interwebs led me to a Chinese company in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province that offers to crank out any kind of oversized custom art you need on an industrial scale, including large stainless steel rings that look unmistakably stargate-like.

But I have no idea if those -- or the varied local examples I listed earlier, for that matter -- are even compatible with Kerf. I don't know much of anything about stargate networking, but if it's anything like train networking, it's bound to be a lot more complicated than any layperson would expect. So if it turns out the two here can only talk to other Sayre stargates, I don't think there are any other local ones in Portland , but the internet says there are others in Raleigh and Lenoir, NC (saving a 3 hour drive between the two cities), plus one in Aurora, CO. And the latter one could be a problem due to its altitude (~5400') and the resulting air pressure difference. If you punch in "send me to Colorado" and as soon as the portal opens you're sucked through like it's a broken airliner window, that's going to lead to some bad yelp reviews, at minimum.

art fence, omsi max stop

Some decorations on a chain link fence around a vacant lot next to the OMSI MAX stop. I don't know anything about who created it, and I'm sure it's only meant to be temporary until the lot gets developed. PortlandMaps says the museum owns it. Come to think of it, I vaguely recall that they either bought the lot or had it donated back when I worked there, about 20 years ago. So I wouldn't exactly hold my breath waiting for a futuristic new museum expansion anytime soon.

Intersection

Next up is Intersection, a sculpture by Michael Passmore located at the SE Clinton/12th Ave. MAX station. TriMet's Orange Line art guide describes it: "Landmark sculpture constructed of repurposed freight rail references the historic impact of transportation infrastructure on the neighborhood."

Aril

A few photos of Aril, the tall red sculpture at the new PSU/OHSU lab building next to the South Waterfront MAX stop. Aril was created by German artist Christian Moeller, whose website describes it thusly:

The idea that served as inspiration for this sculpture on the grounds of the new Life Science Building of Portland’s State University was the highly geometrical and abstract visual representations of molecular structures. Like a tree, the sculpture will consist of a trunk and branches made of cylindrical tubes holding one hundred colored spheres.

A quick note for pedants: I've tagged this post "orangeline" since it's next to the new MAX line, but the sculpture was actually funded as part of the university building, not the MAX line. So it's not MAX art in the strictest sense, but I figured people should be able to find this post even if they don't know who paid for the art. I just thought I should point this out before anyone complains & tries to out-pedant me. Which does occasionally happen, never successfully.

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the new bridge

Couple of photos of Portland's new light rail bridge, which they've decided to call "Tilikum Crossing: Bridge of the People". I can't say that with a straight face. Maybe I'll get used to it someday. Besides the obvious double entendre, "Tilikum" is also the name of a homicidal Sea World orca. I don't claim credit for the name "Murderwhale Bridge", but I'll probably be calling it that a lot.

I stopped by because they've just opened the Esplanade walkway under the east end of the bridge. It's kind of an interesting spot because you get a good look at the attach points for the bridge cables. I suppose all cable-stayed bridges look like this on the underside, but I hadn't seen it before.

Trio

Here are a few photos of Trio the brand new public art at the yet-to-open Lincoln St. MAX station, at the south end of downtown Portland. A recent TriMet press release describes it:

Seattle-area artist Elizabeth Conner and crew installed three abstract, mixed metal sculptures, entitled Trio. The steel sculptures were inspired by the theatrical and participatory work of choreographer Anna Halprin and Lawrence Halprin, the architect of the adjacent Halprin District. The sculptures range in height from 9 to 12 feet and 2 to 5 feet in width.

“In designing sculptures for this space, I considered the Halprins’ radical advocacy for a wide range of participation in spaces that are truly public,” said Conner. “My artwork for this space is a respectful reference to the ephemeral nature of traveling from one place to another, with a glimpse of movement, light and shadow, out of the corner of the eye.”

TriMet usually looks for art that's somehow inspired by the surrounding neighborhood. I rather like this idea that 1960s modernism is my neighborhood's local vernacular.

Orange Lining: Art Starts Now

If you've seen any of the construction sites for Portland's upcoming Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail project, you may have noticed that the usual orange silt fencing has words stenciled all over it. Turns out this is a conceptual art project called Art Starts Now, the first phase of a larger project titled simply Orange Lining. Before construction began, local residents were invited to submit short blurbs of text for use in the project, and of the roughly 1100 submissions, 102 were selected for use in the project. You might think that, as a semi-obsessive Twitter user, I would have been a natural for this sort of contest, but I couldn't think of anything to enter. Based on the eventual selections, they seem to have been looking for something more poetic and upbeat than anything I likely would have submitted anyway. So, no biggie.

In any case, most of the selected lines will also end up in a more permanent form in phase two of Orange Lining, which they're calling simply Impressed Concrete. Which involves the lines being impressed into concrete sidewalks here and there along the new light rail line. I've seen a few of those around already, but I think I'll collect a few more before creating a post about them.