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Grand Rapids now supports public sculpture to a degree unusual for an American
city of its size. There is a Mark di Suvero sculpture not far from the Calder
on the City Hall plaza, one by Joseph Kinnebrew partially submerged in the
Grand River that runs through downtown, and a project by the American Michael
Singer nearby. In 1971, the Grand Rapids Art Museum held a landmark exhibition
called Sculpture Off the Pedestal that was one of the first
American museum efforts to chart the development of modern sculpture. Over
the summer, a new 25-acre outdoor sculpture park, funded by a local philanthropist
named Frederik Meijer, will open on the outskirts of town, with a permanent
collection including work by Claes Oldenburg, Henry Moore, and Auguste Rodin.
"There's clearly a whole lot of energy in this community for outdoor
art," the mayor told me. "I don't want the Maya Lin park to be
taken out of context of what this city is all about and how attached we've
become to this kind of public art."
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Private Residence
New York City, 1999
Designed in collaboration with architect David Hotson, this home changes
like origami to be intimate enough for one person and to expand to
accommodate an entire family. Moveable partitions and furniture make it
possible to convert the two bathrooms into a single suite and the two
children's bedrooms into one larger room. Much of the furniture also has
dual functions. For example, the children's beds convert to seating and
a closet in the master bedroom opens into a home office.
Photos: Michael Moran
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Indeed, Lin's contribution was first envisioned as a single piece of
sculpture, before growing to include a design for the entire park. The site
is a pork chop-shaped plot of land about three-and-a-half acres in
size, right in the heart of Grand Rapids. It's a spot that by the 1970s
had become an unfortunate symbol of the downtown's sagging fortunes. In
1978, in an effort to lure shoppers from the malls that were popping up
near the interstate, the city turned four downtown blocks into a pedestrian
walkway closed to cars. It also created a park with a small amphitheater
that could be used as a skating rink in winter. But it was a misguided attempt
at revitalization: without automobile traffic, the site became more
deserted. "People didn't come to the pedestrian mall because it didn't
lead anywhere," said Wayne Norlin of Design Plus, the local firm
that worked with Lin on the park project. Added Mayor Logie: "We malled--both
ways, m-a-l-l-e-d and m-a-u-l-e-d--that area."
For the mayor, who keeps a copy of Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of
Great American Cities displayed prominently on his bookshelf, the path
to revitalization was difficult but clear. "Jacobs's book told
us what we needed to do," he said. "This is not rocket science."
The solution, he felt, lay in bringing housing back downtown, and giving
the 30,000 employees who work there every day and the 40,000 college students
who attend one of the 13 colleges and universities in the city a reason
to stay there after work or school to eat, hear music, or shop for clothes.
"Not to compete with suburban shopping malls--that's not gonna happen,"
the mayor said, but to try to at least make the downtown look vital again.
To that end, the city decided in 1995 to reopen some of those blocks to
traffic, and reconsidered the role of the park in the process. Meanwhile,
the rest of the downtown was beginning to reawaken: a $75 million arena
opened a few blocks south of the park site in 1996, and a new convention
center is under construction just to the north. To pay for some of the repairs
to the park, the city brought in the Frey Foundation, which is based in
Grand Rapids and has been instrumental in helping to rebuild the downtown
area. Its officials agreed to pay for a sculpture to be added to one
corner of the refurbished park. A Frey committee led by an art consultant
named Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz produced a list of candidates for the commission.
Not long after, the phone rang in Lin's studio in New York. "It was
Joyce, who said, 'Congratulations, you've been selected to do an artwork
for the corner of the downtown park,'" Lin recalled. "There was
a long pause on the phone. And then I said, 'I don't think I ever put my
name in the hat for that one.'"
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Women's Table
New Haven, Connecticut, 1993
Located at the heart of the Yale University campus, this water table
shows a spiral (a symbolic structure with a beginning but no end)
listing dates and the number of women enrolled at the school annually.
The school was founded in 1701, but women weren't officially admitted
until 1873, when 13 enrolled in the School of Art. Since the spiral ends
in 1993, when the table was dedicated, it was left open to signify the
future.
Photo by Norman McGrath
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"And frankly, I wouldn't have," Lin told me, "because my
work does not involve creating an object in that way--I don't do 'plop'
sculpture. Some of my works are object-oriented, but they're all basically
spatially driven." Though Lin's number is unlisted, she occasionally
receives phone calls like this one, from somebody making a congratulatory
offer of work that she almost always declines. Just as Lin was getting ready
to deliver a polite brush-off, Pomerantz mentioned that the city was in
the process of rethinking the role of the entire park.
That piqued Lin's interest: she saw an opportunity to try something more
multidimensional than in any of her previous projects. For a woman who has
public design in her blood--her aunt, Lin Hui-yin, was one of the chief
designers of Beijing's Tiananmen Square--this was an opportunity too attractive
to let slip. A little later Lin told Pomerantz, "Well, I'm going to
propose a concept for the whole park. If you like it, that's great, and
if you don't, that's fine too, and I'll go away." Six months after
that, Lin got the go-ahead. The entire project wound up costing $8.8 million
and was paid for with a mix of public and private funds.
The theme that holds Lin's park together is water and its three phases.
In winter the rink represents the frozen state. One fountain symbolizes
liquid. The other, which in summer lets off bursts of mist, represents water
as a vapor. Because it's a civic project, and because so many officials
and retailers were either involved in its design or had so much riding on
its success, Lin had to deal with a lot more give and take than she's used
to. She and her collaborators, including the New York-based landscape
firm Quennell Rothschild & Partners, were forced during the design
process to cede some crucial space to allow the city to expand the sidewalk
on the southern edge of the park, for example; that meant drastically scaling
back her conception of the landscaping. "That's the tussle of working
with a government body," Lin said. But she added that the experience
has made her eager to design another park. "I think I'm drawn to it."
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Langston Hughes Library
Clinton, Tennessee, 1999
Preserving the original exterior of this 1860s cantilevered barn, Lin
(working with Martella Associates) built a new interior library of
African-American history for the Children's Defense Fund. Upstairs is a
reading room; downstairs the south crib contains a bookstore, the north
crib houses stairs and an elevator, and between them is a garden with a
stone fountain.
Photo by Tim Hursley
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It helped that Lin had been brought in under the auspices of the Frey Foundation,
which provided a buffer in her negotiations with the city. That set-up "allowed
very uniquely for the art to come in the door first," Lin said.
"Artists are usually called in when the architecture is designed and
the buildings, basically, have been built. But here they allowed me to figure
out in an evolving way what the art would do and how it would combine with
the civic functions. And that meant the art could become a catalyst for
the reshaping of a downtown area that was in need of serious help."
Last fall, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, which is now housed in a handsome
but aging Beaux-Arts building by James Knox Taylor about six blocks away,
announced that it would be moving to a new site downtown, abutting the park.
The museum initially put together a short list of a dozen architects that
included Shigeru Ban, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Yoshio Taniguchi,
and Peter Zumthor. When the new museum is finished, in conversation
with Lin's scheme it will complete a vibrant high-design center.
But to Lin, the assumed partner in the design dialogue was not the future
museum but Calder's La Grande Vitesse and the plaza that surrounds
it about a quarter-mile from the new park. While the people of Grand Rapids
have come to love the sculpture itself, they've never warmed to the plaza,
which like many spaces of its era is austere and exclusive. The mayor calls
it simply "a terrible public space." For Lin, the Calder and the
plaza offered an existing artistic statement to bump up against conceptually.
"I like the idea of point-counterpoint. La Grande Vitesse essentially
defines the Modernist ideal of the urban art object in the plaza. For
its time, it's an amazing statement on public art. But for me the question
was, what could I do today that's completely different?"
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The Earth Is (Not) Flat
1998
Stones are precast concrete chairs and a coffee table from a furniture
collection Lin designed for Knoll's sixtieth anniversary. The sculptural
forms were inspired by non-Western furnishings such as Chinese porcelain
pillows, African head rests, and pre-Columbian grinding stones.
Photo by Mihn and Wass
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The result is a space that is green where the plaza is bare, subtle where
the Calder is bold, and sequential and unpredictable, with little pockets
for visitors to hide away, where the older space is static. "It's about
giving you an experience," Lin said, as opposed to presenting a fixed
design. Lin says she approached the job as a sculptor, and thinks of the
final product as an artwork, though one that requires human presence
to activate. And if the challenges the park poses to the definition
of "sculpture" are less obvious than those that Calder's piece
posed back in 1969, in some ways they're just as fundamental.
"It's not off-parallel with what people experienced with the Calder
thirty years ago," said Joe Becherer, sculpture curator for the soon-to-open
Meijer Gardens. "Back then people were saying 'This is sculpture?'
Because they'd been expecting something traditional, like Winged Victory,
and they got--well, they got a bunch of metal. And today people at the park
are saying again, 'Where's the sculpture?' It's an education process. The
transition [with the Calder] really took place based on education over time
and a new way of seeing. A similar thing is necessary now."
To Lin, the most important element of the park's mixture of art and utility
is that the people of Grand Rapids can use it happily even if they have
trouble thinking of it as sculpture. In that sense, she doesn't have to
worry about people complaining, as they did about the Calder, that the city
had been snookered into paying top dollar to some art superstar for something
that was just going to sit there. Last winter, even before the landscaping
was complete, more than 22,000 people came downtown to skate on the rink,
17,000 with free rental skates provided by a local youth foundation. "I
do think it's going to be hard for people to understand what exactly is
the art," Lin said. "But ultimately the question of whether it's
art doesn't matter to me. To me, it was already working the minute people
started skating on it."
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