Public Projects

Here is a look at my various public projects.

• Ticket Office

  Hult Center for the Performing Arts - Eugene, Oregon

  Architects: Hardy, Holzmann, Pfeiffer NYC
  1982

  

  The top band crowning the ticket windows feature a repeating decorative design and music motifs.
  The center band has a garden stage set, overlapping colors of stage lights, and performers on stage.
  The more dream-like lower band shows unformed dancing figures, faces as character types, and floating paper pages.

  

  The glass technique employed has come to be called "fused glass"—essentially the melting together in a kiln of glass pieces placed side-by-side or layered.
  Each ticket window is crowned by a design as shown here. Where this image has layered cincentric cirles of yellow and green, other windows are marked by different colors.

  This sample from the lower band of panels is dedicated to the writers and composers who commit ideas to the page.

  This image presents pages floating, as if existing but not yet brought into the world.

  

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• Eugene Station

  Eugene's central bus station for the Lane Transit District (LTD)

  1995
  Pivot Architecture

  

  Archways oriented north, south, east and west mark entry and departure zones for the buses, and these glass-and-metal panels are at the top and center of each metal arch.
  Artists were to address the theme "Connections."
  A special interest of mine at the time was landscape architecture, and so I keyed in on the salient features of our area—the river flowing north, the mountains to the east, the butte that marks the south end of our valley, and the ocean to the west.

  With blue the cool color and yellow the warm, I used varying amounts in each composition to give a subtext of the four seasons.

  Here the varying fields of color depict the descent into darkness that is autumn.

  The southern terminus of the Willamette Valley- Spencer Butte- will someday return to its Kalapuyan name Champ-a Te, which translates as "Rattlesnake Mountain"

  

  I also designed dichroic glass pyramids that were placed at the clock tower. They are illuminated at night.

  Dichroic glass is glass with a highly reflective metallic-looking coating. They come in various colors, and are one color in reflected light and a complementary color when transmitting light.

  The south arch, the long spine where buses arrive and depart, and the station's public service building.

  

  The Willamette River flows north and has created a rich valley

  The pacific ocean is about an hour's drive from Eugene

  

  The southern terminus of the Willamette Valley- Spencer Butte- will someday return to its Kalapuyan name Champ-a Te, which translates as "Rattlesnake Mountain"

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• Newport Public Library

  Newport, Oregon

  1998

  

  Newport is an Oregon coastal city with a great cultural life.
  A favorite story is that I first designed a window that metaphorically evoked light overshadowing darkness, knowledge driving out ignorance. The presentation did not go well.
  "We're all about the water here" was the message from the jury, so I did as watery a design as I could conceive.

  

  

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• University of Oregon Spencer View Housing

  1997

  GLAS architects

  The project is 26' wide and about 5' tall

  Spencer View is a housing complex at the University of Oregon for international students.

  There are two projects at the complex—a window at the childcare center, shown above, and windows spanning the administration office entry area.

  The childcare center project has elements of places around the world, and travels from the sea in the left-hand panel to the mountains in the right-hand panel. I was engaged with and loving the work of Paul Klee at the time and note a bit of his influence

  The left-hand panel
  

  

  The ship is an image adapted from an old Chinese map.

  With the children in mind, there is a school of fish with one swimming in the other direction.

  The right-hand panel

  I did the valley trees as a sort of color wheel.

  There is a monarch butterfly caterpillar.

  

  A second project for the complex: Glass at the administration office

  Unfortunately the project was taken down and no one seems to have tracked why or when

  

  

  

  

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• Eugene Public Library

  Robertson Sherwood Architects PC
  Special thanks to Randy Nishimura
  2000

  This is a composite photo—these are actually on the east and west ends of the building

  What a great place the library is. So helpful and welcoming.

  I made extensive use of a type of textured glass called thin reeded. The glass has ridges that act as a type of lens, and by orienting the direction of the ridges the light is interpreted differently.

  A few years after the library was completed, I was asked to make a window for the 1st floor east side.

  There was a staff desk placed there and it was thought some privacy from action on the street would be helpful.

  16 individual panels arranged to read as one

  The rectangle repeats the full 2 stories

  This rectangle also repeats the full 2-story height

  Photo: George Filgate

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• Maude Kerns Art Center

  A non-profit art center for teaching and exhibits in Eugene, Oregon

  1998

  The gallery had a regular exhibit that focused on crafts for homes and interiors.

  I pulled a fast one and designed these panels to fit into the existing openings of the gallery doors. I expected to remove them after the exhibit.

  The folks mounting the next show asked me to leave the panels in place. They then stayed there for a number of years, at which time some repairs were needed.

  I planned to remove the panels permanently but a donor stepped forward to purchase them and keep them in place.

  

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• Moss Street Childcare

  Child Care Center at the University of Oregon

  2006

  I conceived of a set of windows for the corridors around an interior courtyard.

  These would have many images from the natural world with each topped with an image of a bird.

  The details would be an opportunity to work with etching and painting techniques and work in great detail.

  This project never went through; shown here is the presentation model.
   

  

  

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• Eugene Police Headquarters

  A Collaboration with sculptor Ellen Tykeson

  2009

  

  The project site is a 120 foot long wall that stretches from the public service building to the security entry gate for the police cars and impounded cars.

  We oriented the chosen blocks to be ordered lines. Ellen designed the cut aluminum sculpture for a central part of the wall and a couple of topical wall inserts at the public service entry porch.

  I designed three stainless steel and glass lanterns to be placed along the wall where it stepped down.

  Together we designed a fused glass lantern with a stainless steel overlay entitled "Two Torches."

  Ellen did the drawing converted into cut aluminum screens and I made the fused glass panels that sit behind them and in front of the illumination

  Themes are the work of hands blossoming and growing and "swords into ploughshares"

  The "broadcast" motif reflects the movement out into the community the police do every day

  I used the three-color motif thinking of traffic lights, and was careful to create a color harmony different than red-amber-green

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• Newport City Hall

  Newport, Oregon

  2008

  

  The commission for the Newport City Hall is a collaboration with my friend and true master of the metal crafting, Greg Wilbur.

  Newport is an Oregon coastal city. Our image is of water and stones and boulders to reflect the way these elements interact at the coast and, metaphorically for the civic process, how they act and shape each other.

  Greg makes what is called raised metal. From a flat sheet of metal and using only variously shaped hammers and, as a backing for the blows, metal stakes, he strikes the metal over and over- thousands of blows. With the resulting compression and expansion of the metal, pieces take shape. Greg made boulder-like shapes which he turrned in at the bottom so the glass watery elements could be tucked around and beneath them.

  These were all mounted on a cut aluminum base for mounting.

  The glass is made with line after line of what are called "stringers." These are lengths of glass about the width of a piece of string. I fused—essentially melted—them onto a base of white glass and then overlaid that glass with concentric layers of clear glass, fused so the edges are rounded and thereby give a wavy optical effect to the stringers below.

  

  

  

  

  

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• Allan Price Science Commons

  University of Oregon

  opsis architecture llp

  2017

  Photo by Chris Alexander

  Allan Price was an over-achiever in his role at the University of Oregon. His death was a loss to the community, and the new commons area associated with the science library is named in his honor.

  His wife Susan Price, an artist, was asked to make an artwork to share at the building. Susan asked me to assist, and together we brought to realization this project.

  The talented local metal worker Randy Ortiz of Ortiz Metals made the raised and repousséd metal rays that tuck neatly under the thick dark glass disk that supports gold-leafed elements. I made the pebble mosaic field. It was also a pleasure to work with Chris Roberts of opsis architecture and the UO planning staff and science department folks.

  We were very pleased with the restrained but rich colors and the variety of textures.

  It seemed right to have a project that was so elemental to make an association with science, which is all about research at an elemental level.

  

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