What a dump! The Phoenix Solid Management Facility rises low and sleek out of the desert, draped in bougainvillea VW and supported by an exposed steel truss nearly 300 feet long. Most sanitation plants hide their operations from public view. This one is transparent, with large windows and a catwalk that opens the activities inside to visitors. Part Frederick Law Olmsted, who redesigned New York City’s Central Park around a muddy quarry, and part Frank Lloyd Wright’s “organic architecture,” the Phoenix recycling center is making design history of its own.
Despite an economic downturn in recent years and despite its bum rap on either coast as a backward oasis for retirees and right-wingers, Phoenix is on the cutting edge of the movement to meld art and public works. The city’s Arts Commission has done more than just put art in public spaces; artists and engineers work together from concept to completion on projects as mundane as street widening and highway-overpass construction. In the hands of an artist like, Jody Pinto of New York City, a simple street intersection becomes a whimsical, restful plaza whose double-spiral design taps into an adjacent irrigation canal.
Phoenix has embarked on an impressive array of big-ticket architectural schemes (total cost: $175 million). They include an ungainly but ambitious new city hall, a daring Art Museum reconstruction by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and a tiny but handsome history museum by Langdon Wilson Architecture, which also did the city hall. Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated building is the Arizona Science Museum, an inventive design by Antoine Predock that, with its cliff-like concrete walls and anodized aluminum peak, will, when completed, pay homage to the high desert and mountains. In May contractors broke ground on local architect Will Bruder’s Central Library, a mesa-shaped structure clad on two sides in solid copper and featuring innovative solar fenestration on the others. “By 1996,” says Jim Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum, “the entire cultural face of this community will be something to behold.”
But it is Phoenix’s smaller-scale innovations that are breaking the newest ground. Perhaps the most striking example is a highway overpass, as befits this vast, caroriented city of more than 1 million people. When the Squaw Peak Parkway was being built, the affected neighborhoods were in turmoil. The Thomas Road Overpass would not only displace residents but also disturb the site of an ancient Hohokam Indian village. Into this potential nightmare walked Marilyn Zwak, a painter from Cochise, Ariz. Zwak worked from the outset with the engineers (“I was so offbeat compared to them”). After hiking up Squaw Peak for inspiration, Zwak came up with an inventive, charming design: giant reptilian support columns with adobe inlays and a series of adobe panels. Neighborhood residents helped to make these, inserting laminated family photos, heirlooms, even caustic comments about the overpass. “It was a healing project,” says Zwak. “It was everything public art should be.”
When Dunlap Avenue was to be widened, the streets department came to the arts commission after residents petitioned to have special protective shields put around new shade trees. Playing on the phrase “tree guard,” a Seattle artist, Garth Edwards, designed metal silhouettes of fanciful pedestrians who seem to be sentinels over the neighborhood and its trees.
_B_Rocky marriage:b As Phoenix has discovered, the marriage of art and infrastructure can be a rocky one. In the case of the new recycling plant, recalls Public Works Director Ron Jensen, “I played referee. I said to the engineers, ‘You guys may not like this, but I want the artists to take the lead and you guys follow’.” That’s what happened. Sculptors Linnea Glatt of Dallas and Michael Singer from Wilmington, Vt., got involved with such basic elements as the color of the steel truss (gray-green) and the landscaping (they would have preferred a planting more subdued than the bougainvillea). It was difficult for the engineers to accept what we do," says Glatt. “And we also had some adjustments to make. We didn’t do art in the usual sense. We addressed a problem.”
The first thing the artists did was to ditch the traditional out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to building a city dump. “These places are always hidden,” says Glatt. “We wanted to bring people in, not shut them out.” The result is an attractive union of function and art: a building that will by next year process much of the city’s garbage beckons visitors with such amenities as a public amphitheater, a community meeting room and a library.
This must be the most theatrical garbage dump in the country. But had the artists not gotten involved until the final stages, as usually happens with public art, “you would have a great decorated box-no more,” says William Morrish, who helped draw up Phoenix’s public-art master plan in 1988 and is now the director of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota.
Luckily for those in the city who were culture hungry, their art lust coincided with phenomenal growth (office space doubled in the 1980s), a rich treasury and a favorably inclined mayor, Terry Goddard. In 1986, the city passed a then-in-vogue “Percent for Art” ordinance that allocated $1 out of every $ 100 in municipal-construction money to public art. Two years later the voters passed a $1 billion public-works bond issue. The possibilities were enormous in such a relatively young city as Phoenix. The small miracle is that once the Phoenix economy sagged in 1990, art was not the first to feel the ax. The pace of construction slowed, but, says Goddard’s successor, Mayor Paul Johnson, “we kept our commitment to the cultural projects.”
_B_Going to pots:_b_That was true, though the pressures to put the artsy types out to pasture were considerable. Especially because of the notorious 1992 Pots Incident, involving a $474,000 series of “vessels” (jugs, teapots, coffee cups and the like) placed on or around freeway noise barriers. This decorative flourish was meant to make people feel better about a 10-lane highway that had been put through their backyard. The pots bombed. The residents seethed. And they retaliated: most famously by erecting a pot of their own-a golden commodeatop one of the noise walls. Johnson, who keeps a souvenir pot (labeled MAYORAL MONSTROSITY) in his office suite, learned his lesson: “You shouldn’t have to cram an amenity down somebody’s throat.”
Johnson’s lesson should not go unheeded. All too often, public art is what Michael Singer calls “plop art”-or as Linnea Glatt puts it, “the artist’s private vision plunked down in public view.” That’s not good enough, she says, fresh from her experience at the Phoenix dump: “Artists are just beginning to appreciate what public art should be.” So is the public, which is just as important. Enlightened programs like those in Phoenix are giving people a new sense of what the role of the artist should be in public works, grand and not so grand.
