One who cannot remember cannot imagine. Gaston Bachelard
The site of the Hillview Library in East San Jose´ is smack in the middle of what was once marketed to consumers as “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”. The mid-century name referred to the Santa Clara Valley, which at its peak had functioned as the fruit basket of North America. In my early research for the library project, I was struck by the stories of the locals who as young teens, had cleaned and prepared the fields, planted, picked and packed the produce and worked in the canneries. With my sense that the new library would act as a sanctuary for the community, I worked with the architects to envision a bold circular entry rotunda supported by eight freestanding columns and a polychromatic painted frieze in the upper reaches of the drum. By drawing from the local histories and translating my experience of communal structures in Europe, Turkey, India and Mexico, I generated the forms and material language. The intention was for a tactile encounter with everyday materials.
In the conceiving of Groundwork, it became essential that it be largely handcrafted. To celebrate the memory of the labor histories, the base of each column is formed with a stack of tractor tires connecting to a shape evocative of a harvest basket milled from reclaimed old-growth redwood. In the third tier, paying homage to the cannery workers, stainless steel cylinders appear as oversized fruit cans riveted to capture the fourth tier of madrone branches. Holding their circle atop each column, the madrone is a marker of the significant indigenous tree revered by the local Ohlone Indians prior to 19th century agricultural interventions.
A series of twenty-six paintings called The Shadow Frieze encircle the rotunda below the windows like a filmstrip traveling 110 feet in circumference. Branches are ghosted like a film negative, and a sense of aerial views tilled land, orchards and crop rows echo the patterns and hue of the labored earth before its erasure. Built from original fruit crates, the painted assemblage Tropicana combines the language and graphics of the farm industry with a quilt-like play of color and pattern.
Slide List
Library Rotunda Groundwork photograph by Dennis Letbetter
Process detail. Old-growth reclaimed redwood was sourced for fabrication of the vessel element of the columns. milled, sanded, shellacked, oiled
Studio view of pre-assembled column elements
The forty tractor tires were prepared at the studio, center openings enlarged and brought to the site at groundbreaking of the building. The engineers and contractors agreed to suspend the tires aloft on the steel “I”-beams for the duration of construction enabling them to be whole cylinders. They survived the duration of construction
Harvesting the madrone
Installation
Studio –painting of The Shadow Frieze
Detail 26 paintings on wood panel 4’ x 4’ each-enamel, pigment and synthetic polymers
