Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation is implementing a plan to illuminate and activate grain elevators and bridges along Buffalo’s waterfront. In San Francisco, a smaller grain silo art project, Bayview Rise, lit up last week, meeting approval of the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, John King. The San Fran project combines lighting and art to freshen up a waterfront industrial site.
First two images by San Francisco Chronicle. Image below by Port of San Francisco.
Bayview Rise is an illuminated mural for the grain elevator and silos of the Port of San Francisco’s Pier 92. Bayview Rise was funded and commissioned by the Port of San Francisco with coordination from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Details on the installation from the artists, Haddad|Drugan:
The project weaves together iconic imagery reflecting the Bayview neighborhood’s changing economy, ecology, and community. Its large-scale graphics will make its primary images visible from a distance, while views up close will reveal the abstract patterns from which those images are composed. In the night sky, the imagery is animated with lighting effects to allow viewers to enjoy the work throughout the day. The artwork is conceived as a gateway into Bayview Hunters Point and will be visible and changing from day to night.
Bayview Rise works 2-dimensionally as a graphic composition and pattern, 3-dimensionally as the pattern articulates folded and rolling surfaces of the historic structure, and 4-dimensionally as colored lights cycle through the spectrum, causing the mural imagery to change its appearance.
Different light colors cause parts of the mural of that same color to glow while other colors recede into the dark background. As the light colors shift, images appear to float in and out of the scene, transfiguring. This striking effect of “illumination animation” results in the appearance of a moving image, abstractly representing a community in transformation, or Bayview Rising.
The composition creates a spatial illusion in which elements appear to rise up and out from a horizon where water meets land and sky. Grounding the image is a bottom layer of water, representing both San Francisco Bay and the past marshlands of Islais Creek. Submerged in the water as a symbol of the neighborhood’s past is the head of a steer in homage to the Bayview’s historic Butchertown and the cattle that once marched down Third Street.
Growing out of the horizon line is a pattern inspired by native islais cherry plants overlaid with a field of shorebirds rising from the water. Soaring above is a heron, alluding to nearby Heron’s Head Park, an environmental restoration project by the Port that is part of the Blue Greenway trail that traverses the shoreline.
Red balloons appear to float from the mural into the sky, referencing a quote by community activist Essie Webb who once likened Hunters Point to a balloon waiting to be re-inflated.
The images within the mural have been combined, overlapped, and juxtaposed in a triangular matrix so there appear to be metamorphoses between cherries and balloons, water and birds, land and leaves. This shift is emphasized with the changing colors of lights.
Each night of the week the lights will cycle through a different sequence of colors, some nights rapidly, some nights slowly, sometimes not changing color at all.
Image above and below courtesy of Demitrios Lyras
The Chronicle’s John King is a fan:
But the aspirational subtext isn’t what turns heads. The size and spectacle of “Bayview Rise” is what makes it so commanding a presence from afar, Bernal Heights or Interstate 280. A low terrain of monochromatic buildings, the blur you look past to take in bay views, gains energy and focus.
In a larger sense, the installation adds to the city’s small collection of big, bold public art.
The “Bay Lights” are one example, the adornment of 300 suspender cables on the west span of the Bay Bridge with 25,000 LED lights programmed to display ever-changing illuminated patterns from dusk until late night. Another is the collection of eight massive Mark di Suvero sculptures that dot the even more massive lawn at Crissy Field through May 26, courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“Bayview Rise” has echoes of each. Like “Bay Lights,” it’s a two-dimensional work applied to infrastructure. Like the di Suvero octet, it reframes how you see a familiar terrain.
Personally, I’ll take “Bayview Rise” over “Bay Lights.” The latter treats the bridge as a display screen, nothing more. But at Pier 92, the incongruity of flat vibrant paint against thick, scarred concrete makes the heft all the more impressive, while the patterned mural takes on depth when, up close, you see how paint applied by humans has been absorbed by a shaft that has sat empty for decades.
Bay Lights
In March 2013, ECHDC approved a phased master plan to install various lighting installations within the grain elevators and bridges along the inner harbor. Phase one includes illumination of the Connecting Terminal grain elevator, Skyway and Ohio Street Bridge, as well as the completion of concept and marketing studies for an approximately 45 minute multimedia show at the Connecting Terminal. According to ECHDC, the lights for this first phase will be switched on in the fourth quarter of this year. Future work will include illumination of the Michigan Street Bridge and illumination and animation of the General Mills complex.