Dekumstruction

The next art whatzit we're taking a look at is Dekumstruction, at NE Dekum St. & Durham Ave., right outside Breakside Brewing, and just down the street from Woodlawn Park. This is public art that doubles as a bike rack for a brewpub, and triples as a stormwater management device. It's hard to dream up a more Portlandia thing than this, and naturally it's won all sorts of national awards. The artists' statement from their website:

Dekumstruction is a sculptural artwork installed on top of a custom bike rack, also designed by artists Peg Butler and Buster Simpson. The art installation works as an overhead shelter for the bike rack and uses materials and imagery related to petroleum. Twenty halved oil barrels that serve as planters represent the culture of big oil and reconnect the petroleum product with the earth. The barrels also receives roof water from an adjacent building which is fed through the planter to a downspout that flows onto an upended oil barrel, beating the drum during rainy days. The installation relates to shifting attitudes about energy, consumption, and stormwater management.

Simpson also created Host Analog, the slowly-decaying log installation outside the Oregon Convention Center.

Big Pipe Portal

This stop on our ongoing public art tour takes us to industrial Swan Island, home to Big Pipe Portal, a monument to... um... an enormous sewer pipe. The sculpture is a round archway at the south end of McCarthy Park, on the upstream side of Swan Island. It's a short walk from the McDonalds, in case you need somewhere to park or have a sudden craving for a McRib. The RACC description explains what's going on here:

This sculpture is sited on the banks of the Willamette River at the confluence of the East Side and West Side Combined Sewer Overflow (C.S.O.) tunnels, and is surrounded by a man-made home to heavy industry. The sculpture echoes an ecological approach to the built environment wherein manufacturing is interwoven with our shared natural resources.

Although the Big Pipe Project is the largest infrastructure project in Portland history, it is largely invisible. Working closely with the Bureau of Environmental Services, the sculpture celebrates this hidden work by revealing and readapting massive precast concrete segments of the Big Pipe. These pieces of infrastructure are now put to work in support of art and narrative. Partially buried in the alluvial bank, the sculpture traces out the circumference of the hidden pipe and transforms it from an industrial artifact into a woven arch of currents and eddies.

The page also notes it was created by the design firm rhiza A + D, which also designed Cloud Cavu at the Cascades MAX station near the airport.

The Big Pipe project is a long-running city project intended to keep raw sewage out of the Willamette. Early on, the city made the unfortunate (but common) decision to have city sewers and storm drain runoff use the same pipes. This obviously saved money, and it generally did the job, except when the combined system was overloaded. When that happened, the overflow, um, material had to go somewhere, and unfortunately the only place it could go was directly into the river. And even more unfortunately, the system was overloaded a lot, because it rains here. So the idea behind the Big Pipe was to install enormous underground pipes on each side of the river to catch the outflow before it got to the river, and eventually direct it to the big sewage plant in North Portland. The westside Big Pipe actually tunnels under the Willamette right around here, and a huge (and mostly underground) pumping station here on Swan Island (next door to Big Pipe Portal) sends it uphill for the last leg of its journey to North Portland. As the description above explains, this was the largest and most expensive infrastructure project in Portland history, and yet the only parts of it visible to ordinary citizens are higher sewer bills, and a drop in the number of "ZOMG Don't Touch The River" alerts on the evening news. Don't get me wrong; like most people over eight years old, I'm basically ok with the sewer system being invisible. I can see how the Bureau of Environmental Services (the oh-so-delicately-named sewer agency) might feel their $1.4 billion investment has gone unappreciated, though. So the art helps the public imagine just how big the pipe is, without making people dwell on what's burbling through the pipe.

Waterline

As with the previous post, we're once again at the Delta Park/Vanport MAX station to look at another piece of Yellow Line public art. This one takes a bit more effort to find; the station includes a couple of overflow parking lots, the furthest next to the entrance to Portland International Raceway. The whole area is naturally low and marshy, and they must have concluded the parking lot would need a stormwater drainage feature. So a small wetland area was created and the lot built around it. This being a publicly funded transit project, some 1% For Art money was spent on sprucing up the new wetland area, and Waterline was born:

The artist was involved with much of the site design including grading, lighting, materials, and plant design. The visual focus is a basalt boulder that Is cut in half with stacked welded steel and acrylic and is lit with fiber optics at night.

That "Art of Stormwater" list from the city that I keep referring back to has a different take. (I apologize for this post being so quotation-heavy, but I figure I can either give you the original descriptions by people who knew what they were talking about, or I can try to paraphrase them as best I can, and I'm not really in a paraphrasing mood.)

Linda Wysong, Artist; 2004 Located near the Vanport site, Waterline integrates art, engineering, and the environment - reflecting the juxtaposition of the built and the natural environment in the managed landscape.

TriMet's Yellow Line art guide elaborates further:

• Massive steel arcs allude to the engineered landscape and Liberty ships made by Vanport residents.
• A glowing monolith of stone, steel and acrylic symbolizes the unity of human and natural worlds.

The "glowing monolith" resembles parts of Wysong's Shifting Assets along the Willamette stretch of Springwater Corridor. You can't really see the "glowing" part here since I took these during the day, but another of the city's stormwater art documents (since stormwater art is a thing apparently) has a nighttime photo of Waterline, showing the, uh, water line glowing. This saves me the trouble of going back to take my own nighttime photos. Which I probably wouldn't do anyway, on the theory that there are likely to be a few mosquitoes here at night for much of they year. I've gone on several times about (pseudo-)bravely risking a case of West Nile on behalf of this humble blog and its Gentle Reader(s). In reality, I think I'd like to avoid that, if at all possible.

Vanport

North Portland's Delta Park / Vanport MAX station features a number of steel tent-like shapes next to the platform stairs. These are collectively known as Vanport, and they're one of the public art installations at this stop:

This storm water swale treats water collected from the bridge and parking lot. The three Corten roof sculptures refer to the Vanport flood,

Michael Creger for bronze storm drain scupper on wall.

It's fair to say this is one of the more downbeat public artworks around town, focusing as it does on the deadly 1948 Vanport Flood. TriMet's Yellow Line art guide elaborates further:

Linda Wysong addresses the area's layered history with an emphasis on the city of Vanport, a large wartime housing project swept away by the flood of 1948.

• CorTen steel sculptures recall rooftops adrift in the 1948 floodwaters.
• Remnants from a Vanport foundation are set into the sidewalk.
• A bronze railing features cast artifacts from the Chinookan culture, Vanport and the Portland International Raceway.
• A cast-bronze scupper channels stormwater into the bioswale below.
• Community maps overlay the current Delta Park site onto the city grid of Vanport, and show the location of the station within the local river systems.
• Works by Douglas Lynch and Timothy Scott Dalbow are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel.

Wysong also created a number of other things we've seen here before: Shifting Assets along the Springwater Corridor; and Portals and Eye River, near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, north of OMSI. Several of those pieces have water themes as well. She also created Waterline elsewhere at the Vanport MAX station, which will be the s

I should point out that the Yellow Line opened in 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina. That, and not the Vanport flood, is probably the event that comes to mind now when you think of floodwaters and rooftops. If, by chance, the line had been delayed, or the hurricane had come a year earlier, this sculpture might have been considered sort of, I dunno, insensitive.

Flying Salmon

So, a while back I ran into a list the city put together titled "Landscapes for Rain: The Art of Stormwater". Which is exactly what it sounds like: Art that does something with rain, or sends some sort of positive message about rain. Those of you who follow the TV show "Portlandia" will find nothing surprising or unusual about this. It's a little, I dunno, twee, if you ask me, but nobody ever asks me.

One item on the list leaped out at me: Flying Salmon isn't just part of this weird stormwater art genre; it's also yet another example of Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream, an endlessly overused and abused motif around here that local public art buyers can't seem to get their fill of. Flying Salmon is not just any set of random downspouts, either; it's part of a swanky New Seasons grocery store in rapidly gentrifying North Portland, right along Interstate Avenue. The snark practically writes itself. Here's how the city describes it:

Flying Salmon, New Seasons Arbor Lodge -
Ivan McLean, Sculptor; Richard Brown Architects AIA;
Lango Hansen, Lanscape Architects; 2005
The highlight of the sustainable approach to rain water collection at this New Seasons Market is the rooftop garden above the entry vestibule. 6400 N Interstate Ave., Portland Oregon. More information on the architects at www.langohansen.com.

I actually took these photos from a southbound MAX train. I'd just been to the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge, where I'd been rained on quite a bit, and I was cold, and didn't feel like it was worth getting off the train for another damn photo of salmon art. It would be hard to beat the top photo anyway; maybe in picture quality if I'd brought the DSLR along, but composition-wise... well, it's heroic salmon atop an upscale grocery store, and there's a freakin' Subaru parked out front. I couldn't beat that if I tried. Incidentally, last December was the 45th anniversary of Subaru arriving in Portland. Back in 1968, nobody could have guessed what a big deal Subaru would become here. Of course they probably figured we'd be flying atomic jetpacks around the moon colonies by now, but I digress.

It turns out that Flying Salmon was created by the same guy who did Rational Exuberance, a big bright yellow sculpture that temporarily sat outside the Pearl District's Encore condo tower. That title, of course, is a play on a famous phrase by Alan Greenspan about the overheated real estate market, and the sculpture sat outside the last condo tower built before the real estate bubble popped in 2008. I'm still not clear on how much of the irony here was intentional, and how much was a fortuitous accident. In any case, I rather liked the art itself, it was just the title I was all snarky about. And to be honest I don't actually dislike Flying Salmon either. I'm sure it's a great set of downspouts and that it's exactly what New Seasons wanted. It's just that it exists in a larger milieu of rich white hipster preciousness, and that's what I keep rolling my eyes about. I've been rolling my eyes about it for years, actually, and so far it doesn't seem to be helping.

Memorial Column, NE 13th & Burnside

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A few years ago, the city of Portland finally did something about the accident-prone intersection of East Burnside, Sandy Boulevard, and 12th Avenue, after a few decades of the public complaining about it. Not everyone loves the resulting Burnside-Couch couplet, but at least the one crazy intersection isn't so crazy anymore. The change involved closing the 2 block diagonal stretch of Sandy between 12th and 14th, as well as one block of NE 13th between Burnside and Couch. The resulting two-block area is supposed to be redeveloped someday, presumably into upscale condos or something. The couplet was the previous mayor's baby and the whole thing seems to have lost momentum after the last election. So for the most part the traffic flow shift is the only thing that's changed so far.

One thing they've managed to do here is jackhammer up part of the former 13th Avenue and turn it into a meandering bioswale, thanks to the city's ongoing obsession with stormwater management. At the Burnside end of the bioswale is a tall metal sculpture with a series of stainless steel fins projecting up from a concrete block. You may have guessed from the post title (and from the general artsy theme I've been running with lately) that this sculpture is why we're here. I noticed it when driving past on Burnside a while back, made a mental note of it, and later tried the usual sources to see what I could find out about it. Searching RACC, the Smithsonian art database, and the library's Oregonian database all came up with nothing. No news stories, no press releases from the city, nothing. When I went to take these photos, I looked all over for a sign giving a title, maybe an artist, something explaining what it's about. I couldn't find a sign, so no luck there either.

So after searching the entire internet, I've found precisely two city documents that mention it. Because we're a deeply process-oriented city, the city's Transportation Bureau had to get a permit from the Bureau of Development Services (a.k.a. the city planning department) before proceeding with the bioswale project. The first pdf (containing the city's official approval of the plan) includes a diagram that calls it Memorial Column, and credits it to Lloyd D. Lindley and Nevue Ngan Associates, while the second (the city's permit application) includes detailed schematics. I see that the sculpture was created by urban designers and landscape architects, so it looks like the local public art community wasn't involved here. Which I guess would explain why it's not in the RACC database. The approval doc explains that the bioswale might be only temporary, assuming the eventual swanky condo towers come with bioswales of their own, but the sculpture has to stay, regardless. The approval further explains "The tall vertical element reveals this important place from a few blocks away" and "As a memorial to a PBOT employee, the proposed column integrates Portland as a theme". The phrasing there is because the city planners have to explain how the design furthers their design goals, and "integrating Portland as a theme" (whatever that means) is apparently one of those goals.

So that's all I know. There are some obvious open questions: Who is this a memorial to? And why? There's obviously more to the story, but for the life of me I can't seem to answer those questions. You'd think there would have been a press release, a dedication ceremony, maybe some news stories, adoring quotes by former PBOT coworkers praising the honoree perhaps. But I can't find any record of any of these things. That seems like an odd oversight, if it was an oversight. And if it wasn't an oversight, but an attempt to downplay the whole thing, that would raise additional questions. I have no idea. As always, if you happen to have the missing puzzle pieces in your possession, feel free to leave a comment below and help sort out the mystery. Thx. Mgmt.

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.

Memorial Inscription

A slideshow about Memorial Inscription, a public art piece outside Portland State's Epler Hall student housing tower. As the name suggests, it memorializes Stephen Epler, who in 1946 founded what evolved into PSU. A cluster of low benches have inscriptions briefly describing Epler's work, and behind them a set of stainless steel panels are etched in what looks like an unknown language.

To understand what's going on here, here's a quote from Margot Voorhies Thompson's artist bio at the US State Department's Art in Embassies program:

"Over my career, my interest in calligraphy has led me to create my own vernacular alphabets that reference elements of historical letterforms. My intention is to combine both archaic and futuristic elements while encoding beneath the surface poetry, literature and song. The invention of language and writing systems is a uniquely human phenomenon. Similar to nature, linguistics has the ability to reinvent itself and adapt over time, or run to extinction. This loss of diversity echoes the fate of our plant and animal kingdoms. By creating my own alphabets, the meaning and impact of the language is changed. The components are abstracted into indecipherable line and shape as I incorporate them into my paintings and prints. I am interested in deconstructing and recreating the language using repeated characters, line spacing and other patterns related to writing, books and scrolls. The meaning of this abstraction is to question what is being communicated. I want the viewer to interpret and wonder anew what they see, much like an archaeological find where an artifact inscribed with a mysterious form transcends symbolism, turning into something more elemental. In my work as a calligrapher, printmaker and painter, tools and surfaces determine the character of the writing and inscription."

Her website shows Memorial Inscription and several other examples of this style. I think it's beautiful. I have to draw a comparison here with another imaginary-alphabet inscription, on the fish-alien fake monument Mimir, which I think has more of a whimsical intent than Memorial Inscription does. A bona-fide art critic (which I've never, ever claimed to be) would likely dismiss this superficial, which is probably accurate. Especially since I don't actually have an interesting compare-n-contrast point to make here; I suppose I'm just pointing out that someone else made art with an invented alphabet and I have photos of that too. So if you'd like a refund of every cent you paid to read this, feel free to leave a comment below or something.

Memorial Inscription is actually a bit tough to find. SW Montgomery is pedestrian-only through much of the PSU campus, including here. Epler Hall shares a block with a much older apartment building, with a narrow alley between them, and the art's down at the far end of the alley. Did I say "alley"? Epler is a LEED-certified green building, so this not-an-alley is supposed to be a sort of educational eco-plaza that does magic things with stormwater. Kind of like the one Portland Community College has over on the eastside. Oh, there I go comparing and contrasting again. Like I said, feel free to request your refund down in the comments section.

Eye River

Eye River sits in front of the Portland Community College CLIMB building at SE Clay St. & Water Avenue, part of something they call the "Stormwater Education Plaza":

The Eye River is a sculpture that refers to the working waterfront of the past and looks toward an environmental future. It functions as an autonomous icon within the Storm Water Education Plaza and as a link to the flow of water and people toward the Willamette River.

The form references the historic ‘log dog,’ a tool used to bind together log rafts that floated down the river to the Inman Poulson Lumber Mill on the nearby riverbank. Although the mill is no longer there, the Central Eastside continues to have a vibrant commercial and industrial component that mixes residential, recreation, and business.

Eye River is not simply an historic marker; it is also integral to the citizens with a vision of a sustainable future. This particular sculpture is the first in a series of three to be placed along the SE Clay “Green Street,” a corridor that leads bicyclists and pedestrians to the river. Each sculpture in the series will have the same cast steel form but the central oculus is specific to each site. The Water Education Plaza is the closest to the river and the pattern of blue and green fused glass alludes to the flow of water with its flickering light.

This project was a joint effort of PCC and Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services. The latter is the polite-society name for the local sewer agency. I was going to say it's more "tasteful" but I'm pretty sure that's not the word I want to use here. In any case, they obtained a federal grant under the the EPA's Innovative Wet Weather Program (which seems to have since ended) to turn SE Clay between 12th and the river into an educational "green street". And because this is Portland, a certain percentage of the green street money goes to art that's sort of related to the concept of rivery greenness.

BES provides one of the core services that allows modern civilization to even exist. Pretty much everyone acknowledges this; it's just that for the most part we'd rather not think about it at length, lest we end up thinking about the composition and sheer volume of what's gurgling along under our feet, and what it probably smells like. Eew. Typically people don't want to hear from BES at all about any topic, because it's rarely a good sign when you hear from them. With any luck, they're merely raising sewer rates again. Otherwise it's because your basement is filling up with... something... and hopefully you didn't have anything valuable stored there.

Anyone who's lived here for a few years has already gotten the memo about stormwater, which is what this Green Street PR effort wants to teach us about. The city and the media harp on it roughly every time the sewers overflow, which still happens every so often. It seems the BES agency's distant forebears back in the 19th century did a very silly thing, and designed our storm drains and sewers to flow into the same pipe, because it was cheap and they didn't know any better. This design sort of works ok until there's a rainstorm, because when one overflows, both of them overflow, and they both overflow straight into the river, untreated and unfiltered. And it turns out we're in a part of the world where it rains every so often, to put it mildly. The BES just spent two decades on the $1.4 billion Big Pipe project to kinda-sorta address the problem. But they'd still like us to know that if less rain went into the sewers, that would be awesome, and they'd like to share some Important Tips about how you can be a better person, at least where stormwater is concerned. I'm not sure they offer actual sewer rate discounts for being a better person though.

Anyway, here are a few items about the project as a whole, and where Eye River fits into it:

• City fact sheet about the Stormwater Education Plaza
• City PR for the project
• PCC PR for the project
• SE Clay Green Street Project
• Next phase starting construction, August 2013
• CSO (Combined Sewer Outfall) outlet at the foot of SE Clay, and another nearby at SE Hawthorne. This may be a reason they picked Clay as their prototype green street. Though I'm completely unclear on whether this green street is supposed to be an operational thing, or a symbolic, educational measure.
• Artist's page about Eye River
• Some interesting photos from the local firm that fabricated it.
• Presentation about Eye River and related works, to the US Green Building Council in March 2013.