Main Entrance Now Has Steps

Lovely to see the building after a week away. Concrete steps have been poured for the main entrance. Work's been done on the green roof area. The air ducts on the main floor where Kaneem Smith's piece will be installed look great. Carpet is being laid on parts of the first floor. The recycled wood timbers above the racetrack are all installed and are quite good looking. Each group of timbers spells out a word. Should one lay on the floor and look up - and if one could read bar code - then the ceiling would speak to you. Good things are happening.

The AIA Gala is this Saturday evening. 700 people will be partying in the lobby. I can see there is plenty of work still to be done to make it a safe and elegant party place. I am sure they'll make it happen.

Blue Skies in the Basement

Met with Serena Lin Bush at the site today along with Cody, one of her IT partners. She wanted to check the stairwell pit once again, now that the row of recycled wood timbers has been set in the space. Serena's monitors will be attached to the recycled timbers. She brought white paper cut in the sizes of each of the monitors. Just to check on placement and ease of seeing. She opted not to use the wall behind the stairway. We decided that the stair railings themselves would cover the monitor and it would loose its effectiveness. So all monitors will be flat in the pit.

I still get goose bumps when I think about Serena's piece. Several cameras will be mounted on the roof of the building and will photograph the sky continuously. Cabling will bring the images down to the monitors in the basement. So viewers will see real sky in the bottom of the stairwell and will be able to look up all the way to the top of the stairs four stories high and see that same sky through a skylight. It's a very cool idea.

A Green Message From Yellowstone

Disheartening to read that Yellowstone National Park has tons of garbage left by sightseers at Old Faithful. The park used to ship this plastic garbage overseas, but now they send it to Georgia where it's made into a woven, fleece-like material for carpeting backing. Makes for jobs in the U.S. and that's a good thing. But what a pity that American citizens litter their own national monuments. Makes me long for the days when there were commercials on television with an old Native American giving an anti-litter message with a big tear running down his cheek. You won't see a commercial like that these days. I suspect that even the Don't Mess With Texas campaign against highway litter has been defunded.

None of this has anything to do with the civic art project at 1002 Washington Avenue, except for the fact that the city is making this facility a model 'green' building that is currently tracking for a LEEDs gold rating. And some of our artists are using recycled materials in work created especially for this building. They would be Dan Havel, Dean Ruck and Kaneem Smith. I think we can add Metalab Studio to this list. They plan to have some recycled trumpets and coronets in their piece as receivers of CO2. Yes, we'll be encouraged to blow CO2 into these horns and see what happens on a large screen at the end of the main lobby.

We can't wait to show the public all the art in this building.