Copyright: 2015 Chihuly Studio
CHIHULY
Coral Glow Persian Sconce Wall (detail), 2015 Port Everglades CruiseTerminal 4 Blown glass, steel, 14½’ x 12½’
publicARTandDESIGN www.broward.org/arts/publicart
Ammonite Intervention by Lars Stanley w w w . f w p u b l i c a r t . or g
Remind us of that event. The year 1854 was when the first seamless railroad connection between the East Coast and the Mississippi River was completed. The nation was on the march from coast to coast, and reaching the Mississippi River was an important milestone. To celebrate, the builders of the railroad gathered together 1,200 dignitaries from the East Coast and invited them to take free passage to Chicago, where they would get on an excursion train to Rock Island, Illinois, where the railroad ended, and then ride a riverboat all the way up to the brand-new city of St. Paul, Minnesota, chartered one month before this excursion. So it was brand-new; there was no Minneapolis. I did a little bit of math: Ten years from 1994 will be 2004, which would be the 150th anniversary of the Grand Excursion of 1854. Why don’t we do another one of those? So the short version is we did do it. It took ten years to plan it. It turned out to be an incredible success. Fifty-five different communities along 400 miles of the river put on festivals and did various sorts of public art. You’ve given a couple examples of deep placemaking—this notion of discovering the soul or personality of a place. Can you help differentiate them from straight-on placemaking, or creative placemaking, where an artist helps guide the vision? They’re all three really good processes, and I really want to emphasize I don’t think one is better than another. But with each, there is a different methodology or approach. Standard placemaking is a process of putting together a budget and a schedule and a set of deliverables. It’s a little bit more of a recipe type of thing. There are some standard elements of basic placemaking: a mixture of uses, public spaces, connectivity for pedestrians, maybe transit as well. When you add artists into the mix, it becomes a little bit less certain exactly what you can deliver and when you can deliver it, because you are looking for imagination and inspiration to enter the project. When you get to the level of deep placemaking, it becomes even less certain what the deliverable is going to be, but on the positive side, it may turn out to be something really marvelous. The element of surprise is much more built into the deep placemaking process. Simply by asking the question, “What does this place want to be?” and exploring clues that might suggest an answer, good surprises will come along pretty quickly. When you begin to look more deeply into the natural history of a place—what are the patterns of birds and animal activity there? When you look into the actual human history of the place—what are the local legends or stories of haunted houses or what-have-you? These are things that might get neglected in a standard planning process, but they might reveal some really interesting buried treasure. That’s certainly what happened in both the Dallas case and in the Grand Excursion case. JOE HART is senior editor of Public Art Review.