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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012
Volume 11 Issue 72
Santa Monica Daily Press
ARTS IN THE CITY SEE PAGE 6
We have you covered
THE SLOW YOUR ROLL ISSUE
Damaged ‘Chain Reaction’ sculpture needs a savior BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
CIVIC CENTER “Chain Reaction,” a mushroom cloud-shaped sculpture in Santa Monica’s Civic Center, will need a guardian angel with a lot of cash if it hopes to remain in place through the end of 2012. Both the Arts Commission and Public
Art Committee voted Wednesday night to recommend that the City Council allow a six-month window for the public or another donor to raise the nearly $425,000 that may be necessary to test and repair the sculpture before allowing staff to deaccession the work. The recommendation will be taken up by the City Council at the end of March, at
which point elected officials will decide whether the anti-nuclear message embodied by the work outweighs potential public safety concerns should the piece fall. “Chain Reaction,” a 26-foot tall monumental sculpture designed by Pulitzer Prizewinning political cartoonist Paul Conrad, was donated to Santa Monica in 1988 and accepted by the City Council in 1990 after an
extensive public process. Testing conducted over the summer by conservationist Rosa Lowinger and engineering team Larry Bruegger revealed structural weaknesses and corrosion to the inner steel structure from exposure to wet conditions and salty sea air. SEE SCULPTURE PAGE 10
The missing ‘R’ Reuse of building materials gets play in Santa Monica BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
MID CITY Although the Bourget Brothers
Daniel Archuleta daniela@smdp.com
CLOSER LOOK: John Bourget, of Bourget Brothers Building Materials, on Thursday inspects bricks he hopes to resell. The bricks come from a building at the corner of Colorado Avenue and 17th Street that was razed to make way for a parking lot adjacent to a future station for the Expo Light Rail line. The line is expected to reach Santa Monica in 2015.
Gary Limjap
Building Materials and Hastings Plastics have been neighbors for a number of years, it wasn’t until demolition teams rolled into the Hastings lot Monday that John Bourget realized the entire building was made of brick obscured by thick plaster. Bright, red brick. “We’re begging for the brick on that construction right now,” Bourget said. He grabbed a brick off of the outer wall facing 17th Street and ground white lime off of it, exposing the name “Simons” underneath. People prefer bricks with a heightened red color and a name because it gives them a sense of uniqueness, Bourget said. “It’s like a diamond merchant,” Bourget said of his brick selection process. “He studies your diamond, sees the purity of it, the clarity and shine. It’s almost that way.” Bourget’s scavenging — to be formalized with the Exposition Light Rail Authority which is building a portion of the new light rail station at the site — is a form of creative reuse, an endeavor as profitable to Bourget as it is beneficial to the environment. A reclaimed brick can be resold for almost the same price as a new one, somewhere between 80 cents and $1.25 in Bourget’s estimation, and it prevents a brand new structural brick from being used unnecessarily.
Seamus D. McDonald
(310) 586-0339 In today’s real estate climate ...
Experience counts! garylimjap@gmail.com www.garylimjap.com
Reuse also means that little to no new resources will be put into transforming the brick into something else, be it gravel or road base. A brick structure has to be carefully deconstructed, the bricks scrubbed clean of lime mortar holding them together and transported on pallets to their final sales destination, in this case only yards away. They can be used for decorative walkways, fireplaces and other uses that please the eye but neither rely on structural integrity nor require much additional processing. Key to repurposing old materials is the concept of “embodied energy,” or maintaining the resources needed to make the product in the first place, said Brenden McEneaney, a green building program advisor with the Office of Sustainability and the Environment. “If you make a brick, clay had to get dug out of the ground and brought to a manufacturing facility kiln,” McEneaney said. “A lot of carbon was expended to make that product in the first place, and a lot would be expended to make a new product.” Keeping the product whole means saving transportation impacts and other resources like water and chemicals needed to transform the substance into something else. That makes “reuse” second best in the environmentalist mantra “Reduce, reuse and recycle,” said Arthur Renaud, regionSEE RECYCLE PAGE 11
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