Yerba Buena Island Hilltop Park Public Art Project

Hilltop Park on Yerba Buena Island is a place where visitors can appreciate the views of San Francisco, Oakland, and the Bay Bridge. Visitors can contemplate the former agricultural, the industrial, and the military history of the Island as well as observing the ebb and flow of their current lives and their relationship with the re-development of the site.

A symbolic contemporary version of a cornucopia or horn of plenty speaks of the past visions and the re-visioning of the Yerba Buena Island today. The “Untitled” sculpture is also intended to capture the vista like views observing remnants from the past and a portal to navigate through to the inexhaustible possibilities. Free standing the sculpture is installed at a point of vast ecological change for the San Francisco Bay area. Recycled tires are part of that ecological voice. A contemporary material is used in the construction of the sculpture. It flows into the sustainable development concept of renewable energy, conservation, green infrastructure, stormwater treatments, etc.

This monumental artwork 65 feet high x 24 feet long x 21 feet wide is created and constructed in a modular.format. It is designed in 20 sections. These will come apart at the studio and re-assembled together at the Hilltop Park. To construct the armature of the sculpture we will bend the stainless steel, then cut the metal into pieces of varied sections, design the form, and weld the sections together using 3/16 stainless steel round pipe. Bias and steel belted radial tires are deconstructed then processed into various shapes. The rubber tire material is cut into desired shapes, forms, and will be manipulated to fit the stainless steel armature.

Stainless steel self tapping fasteners, bugle head screws, threaded bolts,and flanges, etc. are used to attach the rubber tires to the stainless steel metal, rubber to rubber tires, and metal to metal. The final surface treatment on the sculpture is bias radial tires. Footings are poured so the sculpture is bolted into the ground.

The basic material used in the construction of this sculpture described above is rubber tire. Black rubber tires are ubiquitous and they are used here as a symbol of birth and rebirth; and renewal for the island. Metaphorically this sculpture radically transforms tires to bridge the islands past with its future ideas. The swirls of tires create an amalgamation of organic materials, visual textures and technology. The artwork will feel like a beacon drawing viewers up to explore the beauty of the landscape and the natural environment.

View larger image of proposal. 

Art that is chosen (or given) rather than made. This idea of Marcel Duchamp has an ever-greater weight in my creative output of recent years. The starting point for my proposal for the Treasure Island Arts Master Plan was not to “make” a sculptural shape but to ask myself what should be “given” to this very specific place. There is such a thing as place memory. Treasure Island was the site of the 1939 World’s Fair. The Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco with Treasure Island, Yerba Buena Island, and Oakland, was completed in 1936.  Going further back in time, there was the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the gold rush of 1848, and the arrival of the Spanish settlers in 1769. Back beyond that, humans first moved from the Eurasian to the American continent 15,000 years ago.

My task, I feel, is to delve into humanity’s past memories and to revisit the actual place where human consciousness was born. Its origins are shut away in the primordial darkness of eternity. Humanity’s destination, meanwhile, seems to extend into the future as far as infinity. I therefore felt that the challenge I had been “given” by the place was of a hyperbolic curve that would suggest both infinity and eternity: two converging curved lines, getting closer and closer but never meeting, whose shape is expressed by the following cubic formula.
 

Surface of revolution with constant negative curvature

The concept of infinity is a human invention. The point of infinity is a paradox, but should it exist in the natural world, it must be in a faraway place beyond the edge of the universe; or maybe it is no more than an illusion born inside the human brain. Nonetheless, ever since its birth, the human race has persisted in seeing this illusion. We call it art.

In the material world, it is physically impossible to make a point that reaches all the way to infinity. What I can do, however, is suggest infinity by making an approximate point that can exist in the material world, as a mathematically modeled structure with a 1 1/8-inch-wide tip.

This mathematical model, to be placed on Yerba Buena Island in the center of San Francisco Bay, will act as a monumental sundial, while evoking the Tower of the Sun from the 1939 World’s Fair. From the longitude and latitude of its position, I can calculate where the tip of the shadow of the tower will fall at noon on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. A large stone will be placed at that particular spot with vertical grooves carved into its polished flat surface for precise observation of the position of the noon shadow.

Rather like a rotating top, the Earth’s axis is actually wobbling very slightly. Five thousand years from now, that wobble will reach its greatest magnitude. But ten thousand years from now, I predict that the axis will revert to where it is today. This tower will allow future civilizations to observe these changes. The creation of the pyramids is shrouded in mystery. By contrast, this tower will act as a symbol expressing humanity’s yearning for the infinite even 50 centuries in the future.

View larger image of proposal.