The Doxa

For more than a year, Rebar has been working on a monumental public art piece for Portland Tri-Met’s Clinton Street station, a stop along Portland’s new Portland-Milwaukie light rail line. The design is finalized and we are please to unveil the piece here:

Named “Intersection,” the sculpture comprises repurposed surplus light rail track extracted from a location mere feet from the sculpture site. The intersecting geometry is inspired by the abstract topological subway maps you see on train platforms the world over.  At night, the sculpture will be lit for dynamic views of the piece and to help it become a way finding landmark for folks in the Brooklyn or HAND neighborhoods who are looking to catch the train.

How do you get rail (which is called “light rail” though it weighs well over 100 lbs per foot) to bend at such impossible angles? We’re not giving away any secrets, but suffice it to say Portland fabricator and artist Jim Schmidt and his team at Art & Design Works, are alchemists, and may well be wizards too. We have also been pleased to collaborate on the piece with the excellent structural engineers at Grummel Engineering and the talented designers and engineers at Interface Engineering, who did the lighting design. Look for the piece to be standing tall sometime in 2015!

Rail like it’s never been bent before

New project!

Nomadic Grove, commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in downtown San Francisco, is now under construction at the Rebar studio.  The project is an experimental outdoor landscape sited at the museum’s entrance and consisting of an archipelago of gem-like seating islands, each holding a specimen tree at its center.

The installation is a meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city. To sit for a moment, relaxed, while gazing up at a tree that frames the sky is a simple and profound human experience–one that is in short supply in modern cities. This is a rare urban experience because trees resist the city’s constant motion, the city’s ruthlessness, the impatient cosmopolitanism.

The wood-framed islands are suspended low on wheels, floating just above the surface of the plaza as if they were riding on a calm lake. The modules are anchored in one of several compositions at the museum’s entrance, changing formation from week to week. The trees–oak, olive, and cypress–are adapted to the climates of both Israel and the Bay Area, representing the Mediterranean biome that is shared between the two regions.

The islands provide a means for visitors to inhabit a familiar urban space in novel ways, creating amphitheaters, seating, lounging decks, informal classrooms, or social spaces, depending on the day and configuration.

Nomadic Grove is open to the public in conjunction with the exhibition, Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought, on view at CJM from February 16th through May 28th, 2012.

Another new commission! Rebar begins 2012 with work on an exciting project in Seattle: an interactive light sculpture designed to activate the newly built Jackson Plaza at night. The piece will respond interactively to the motion and proximity of people who walk by, or walk through, the plaza. Installation is slated for early spring ‘12. More details to come in coming weeks, for now here’s a few teaser images.

Rebar was delighted to provide some of our Bubbleware at the 2011 Treasure Island Music Festival, one of San Francisco’s premier music festivals. Bubbleware is a modular social furniture system that uses an inflatable interior structure covered by a sewn ripstop nylon skin. The skin, created in partnership with messenger bag company Timbuk2, is a durable material perfect for heavy-duty playtime. Bubbleware is rearrangeable and stackable, allowing for endless options and lots of fun. The design for Bubbleware was originally commissioned by Sydney Art and About’s Laneways exhibition, where Bubbleway (the Australian incarnation of the project) is currently on display at Bulletin Place through January 2012.

Rebar traveled to Sydney, Australia in early October for Sydney Art & About, an annual arts festival that utilizes public spaces around the city of Sydney. The idea of Sydney Art & About is to create an interactive public art gallery in the streets, transforming the city itself into a living canvas. Evoking a response from residents of Sydney, whether it be to laugh, question, think, or simply smile, Art & About seeks to bring art to the forefront of the social conscience.

Rebar’s contribution to Art + About is Bubbleway — a modular, inflatable social furniture system designed specifically for Laneways 2011, the fifth installment of Laneway Art. Utilizing an inflatable system enclosed in a brightly colored skin, Bubbleway serves as a fun, comfortable, and inviting place to relax. The skin, which was designed in collaboration with the San Francisco-based messenger bag company Timbuk2, is a resilient ripstop nylon perfect for the urban playground. It was also made locally in San Francisco. Bubbleway modules can be reconfigured and adapted to support a variety of interactions and the space it is occupying. Bubbleway was created to encourage a rethinking of preconceived notions of public space, and to develop new forms of informal social interactions and play.

Other commissioned works for Art + About and Laneways included artists from around Australia and Americans Janet Echelman, whose work can be seen as locally as at SFO, Bay Area native Barry McGee, and Austin-based founder of Knitta Please, Magda Sayeg. Rebar would like to extend a profound thank you to the city of Sydney and to acknowledge the curators who brought us to Sydney, Amanda Sharrad and Justine Topfer for their hard work and commitment to experimental and innovative public art.

Bubbleway is available for viewing and playing on for free 24 hours a day from September 23, 2011 to January 31, 2011 and is located at Bulletin Place, Sydney, NSW 2000.

Tomorrow lunchtime….the state capitol…

Whoa, day 2 has been huge! Many of our volunteers have commented that they’ve done more ironing in the last day than in their whole lives. It’s strange that architecture and ironing….two ends of the domestic spectrum…are converging in the making of the Sho-Globe. We have 26 long sections (each, coincidentally, 26 feet long) seamed together to form the two concentric shells of the Globe.

We’ve had – again – a great volunteer turnout, and many curious passersby stopping by to ask when we’ll be deploying Sho-Globe on the streets and squares of Juneau. Just a few more hours…

By the end of the day, all of our major sections were put together and we’ve scoped out several potential sites around town to launch. Karen, Adam and Blaine also did a radio interview with James on Juneau’s KXLL.

Day 1 saw a busy volunteer turnout at our storefront workspace at 118 Seward, with all the panels cut for Sho-Globe, power system up and running, and getting ourselves organized at our new space. That took less time than we thought…which is good, because the next step is sealing the panels together which can be a tricky process. Thanks to the many folks in Juneau who came in to help Monday!

Last year the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition organized a contest among artists to redesign the standard bike rack for Treasure Island, using the same square steel tubes that are used in many mass-produced bike racks. The redesigns reference the island, intended to add to a sense of place. Now you can see the top three designs implemented on Market Street and Polk Street, and test out these sculptural bike racks.

Todd Gilens’ winning design references the diagonal street plan for Treasure Island (a grid intended to prevent wind tunnels from prevailing winds).

Todd's Bike Racks at 1020 Market Street

Runners up include Kirk Scott’s design, racks shaped to look like the map of Treasure Island and include intersecting bars that reference the exact location of each bike rack.

Kirk Scott's Bike Rack in Front of City Hall (on Polk Street)

The last fabricated bike rack is Ryan Dempsey’s wave design, which is located on Polk Street, also in front of City Hall.

Ryan Dempsey's Wave by City Hall on Polk Street

To look at the original design boards and read more about San Francisco Bike Coalition’s work helping create a bike and pedestrian friendly Treasure Island, check out their blog.

Public art and public participation have been evolving a lot in the last forty years. But how do you create an art plan that can respond to changing ground conditions? Because plans are implemented over a scale of decades they need to be both specific and adaptable–and stay relevant even as the neighborhoods they envision change unexpectedly. We got the chance to team up with Cliff Garten Studio, Todd Bressi and Via Partnership to test out a new approach to creating a public art plan for the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, which will soon be connected by a new light rail line. The art plan will reach out beyond the Central Corridor light rail, to shape the surrounding neighborhoods which will be influenced by the new infrastructure. According to the project client, Public Art Saint Paul:

The Metropolitan Council’s Central Corridor LRT project has engaged visual artists to create public art at the Project’s 18 new stations and platforms. This Art Plan seeks to go beyond the LRT public art program in scope, range of artistic media, and time frame. The Art Plan will articulate a vision for art in multiple media and move beyond the stations and platforms to consider the entire public realm: public buildings, the streetscape, landmarks, pathways, parks and open spaces, and water quality infrastructure. It will engage neighborhoods, educational institutions, and economic and cultural centers and envision opportunities for public art in future private sector transit oriented developments.

The project represents an opportunity for a new approach: using artwork itself as a means to engage the public and give shape to the plan. As a part of the process, Rebar envisions public events in the spirit of Park(ing) Day that engage community members around the physical territory of the new Central Corridor to test ideas, learn about the site, and prototype new ways of inhabiting space as a means of gathering first-hand data that can inform the art plan.

After the field was whittled down to three contenders last month, we got word that our team was selected to create the plan. We’re excited to bring to bear several emerging themes of our practice to bear on this new project.