KiM WEST
INEXHAUSTIBLE BLOOMS (ODE TO BOHEMIA, No. 5)
A kinetic mural wrapping four façades of a future-proofed 520,000 square foot structure in Mountain View, CA
'Future Proof' was a phrase that stood out when this project started back in 2019. I don't think I'd heard the term before. My understanding is that it basically means trying to design something with the intention that it can be re-used, or adapted, so that in the future it's not obsolete. I love this way of thinking - everything can become something, everything can turn into something else. Endless uses, iterations, reconfigurations. Thrifting at its finest.
When I was brought onto this project, the site was a fenced off dirt construction field, and it was very exciting to be party to materiality ideations. Even more so when we landed on a façade concept that would sway on the breeze via kinetic flappers.
BEGINNINGS + RESEARCH
The structure would sit on Google's Mountain View HQ campus, and notably, on the Green Loop – a bike and walking path running through the campus, connecting nature corridors.
This was also to be a parking structure that could transform into offices, living spaces - who knows!?
Joy, color, flora, fauna, and a sense of place were imperative to the concept.
A prime directive was to hop on a GBike, ride out to the Shoreline, and observe the Bay along with all that grows en route to it. Hard to be more excited!
Embarking on this project included delving into historical documents of recorded mappings and descriptions of the landscape over past centuries, as well as new plans for initiatives that would help to re-establish a sense of complex and diverse ecology in the site's environs that had been disappeared from decades of urbanization efforts.
Ecology maps from the 1860s showed natural flows of several nearby creeks connecting as they meandered the topography. These connections were severed due to eventual urbanizing creek-straightening efficiencies, and their meandering status was said to be lost. I loved the notion that those lost meanderers could be imaginatively reconnected in the ether of composition.
In this phase of this project, I learned about The San Francisco Estuary Institute, from where the above maps and etching imagery are sourced. The Institute is a treasure trove for (amongst other things) documents relating to historical Bay Area landscape and ecological mapping information. In one of their technical papers on vegetation and drainage patterns, I read a quote that painted a picture in my mind. Mary Bowden Carroll described the 1903 landscape from Palo Alto to Mountain View as, “A continuous park of nearly ten miles long and three miles wide, carpeted during the entire year by green sward and blue grass, all of which is bedecked with violets, poppies, roses, lilies."
Hat tip to Abe Books, where I always find the best out of print stuff, and where I found a copy of Bowden Carroll's Ten Years in Paradise: Leaves from a Society Reporter's Note-book. A society writer from the East Coast smitten with her adopted home of the Santa Clara Valley, Bowden Carroll was writing about the area’s environment at a time when the landscape had already been (in her view) altered significantly by farming, industry, urbanization, and development. She writes of the Valley in 1903, " I wonder what an enthusiastic botanist would have observed and described in 1803, and 1703?" (This so reminded me of the way landscape painters of, say, The Hudson River Valley School, would write about their perceived degradation of the vistas they were painting in the 1800s. Nostalgia!)
Also found in Bowden Carroll's notebook was this perfect encapsulation on the evocation of flowers, the essence of which eventually contributed to title choice for the completed work:
A display within an exhibit at Mountain View's Computer History Museum was an important inspiration flash point for my thinking about relevant approaches to exploring the environs surrounding the site. I had been wondering how to authentically mash up my painterly, gestural way of working with a grid format.
In the middle of the last century, Britain's Institute for Terrestrial Ecology was collecting data on plants and animals of the British Isles, and needed a way to organize, document, and communicate their findings.
Punch cards typically used in office settings were taken into the field and data was recorded on site. The cards were then returned to the office so that the information could be translated into representative dots.
A computing system plotted the dots of data onto maps– the automation mechanically expressing the distribution of species location. Eventually this data would become the basis for Atlas of the British Flora.
WATERCOLOR STUDIES
A collection of watercolor studies describing the colors and gestures of elements native to the environs evolved from Google-deep-dives into myriad landscape and flora guide sources, and smatterings of quirky birding and lepidoptera sites specific to the creeks and salt marshes of the Bay Area. Also informative were site explorations, revealing a striking volume of color and life. Blackened buckwheat blooms silhouetting against an impossibly blue sky. The water of the creek reflecting that blue, and the reeds, grasses and scrub, and the hot-pink splotches of Pickleweeds lacing the banks. The y-e-l-l-o-w. Soft nickel yellow Coyote Bush. School bus yellow Mules Ears. Sunshine yellow Yarrow. Primary yellow Pacific Gum Plant. Yellow ochre Fleshy Jaumea.
PETITE MAQUETTES
The petite maquettes are graphite and/or gouache on paper, each measuring approximately two inches tall, and illustrate initial iterations of general color stories and composition. The completed work would be an abstracted, wandering, flowing landscape rooted in color data mined from site environs investigations and supporting contextual research.
I imagined everything blooming all at once, with no regard to season but with exacting detail of place. I hoped this work might expand a viewer’s experience of the landscape, and heighten senses to it. With no limits by season or century, this work could be a celebration of found color.
PALETTE DEVELOPMENT
The eventual palette would be neccessarily limited by confines of technical considerations, but I wanted it to feel expansive both in the creation process and in the finished work. The research based watercolor studies were a foundation from which to mix a working list of site-specifc colors that could strategically create the world I was imagining. It felt important that not every color from the palette be reflected on every side of the structure. Each section should have its own identity and color story, yet, if unfurled and laid out in a row, the whole would be experienced as one long cohesive and meandering journey, propelled by color.
BIGGER MAQUETTES
Twenty painting canvases, proportionally scaled to site dimensions and lined up end to end, created a maquette 48" tall and 113 feet long. From most vantage points on site, the scope of each façade surpasses the capacity of a viewers’ single field of vision. The painting maquettes were therefore intentionally scaled to also be impossible to view in a single field of vision. This approximation of experience informed the process of articulating and refining massings of proportions of color, transitions and subtleties. From afar, the composition was planned to give space to chase, linger, or drift. Up close, abstractions of form could dissolve into seemingly endless and shifting color fields.
I worked on four or five of the 20 paintings at a time, focusing on ordered sections reflective of façade expanses. Shuffling the canvases around to see how things would line up, and keeping in mind the initial gestures of the small scale maquettes, the scale of these paintings allowed me to make washy and loose marks layered with blotchy opacities. Viewed from inches or football fields away, the fragmented mural is a portal to reach someplace else, a literal and figurative connection to the environment. Inviting color, generously applied, encourages a sense of discovery about what is next, about what is around the corner.
GRID STUDIES
Painting for me is an intuitive process, an aesthetic distillation of research. The culmination of my studio processes would ultimately be plotted onto squares – not dots on a map, but pixels on architecture. The studio work established an ordering system and a documentation of visual information that, when processed through my lens of color, married a technical and exacting media to the expressionistic nature of meandering and painterly compositions.
Each square of every grid study measures about 3/16th of an inch, and there were over 100,000 to fill. I used flat brushes almost exactly the width of each square, but this part was still beyond tedious. And, also satisfying once the squares started to add up. Also, I had lots of time to listen to excellent podcasts and re-listen to some favorite audio books. (A few faves: The Great Women Artists , Ninth Street Women , The Story of Art Without Men , Sound And Vision , Daybook: The Journal of an Artist By Anne Truitt )
The grid studies helped to inform the composition, particularly where the surface shifted for various building contours. They illustrated the concept of turning gestural and washy paintings into grid form, and they would ultimately help approximate the eventual flapper count and placement.
Everything, all at once. At some point, all the maquettes of all the sizes, the grid studies, the watercolor studies, and sample palette swatches began a back and forth relationship, each informing and pushing the other.
Pictured top to bottom- north, east, west, south, the assembled grid studies for each façade.
PALETTE NEGOTIATION
The final palette was narrowed down to 35 colors. Many original color choices for the studies and paintings had near-exact Pantone matches. This was helpful because Pantone swatches have standardized formulas, which would make it easier to create the correct color of flapper paint coating.
A large handful of colors were more problematic to get right, and several others were more problematic still. FedEx packages of swatches and samples were sent back and forth over weeks and months, with the manufacturing partners patiently and meticulously adjusting their formulas dozens of time to get us as close as possible to the desired palette hue. That tenacity eventually resulted in a complete palette of 35 colors that would satisfy all requirements, technical to aesthetic.
ANALOG TO DIGITAL
The final step before all of the work was handed off to the production and installation teams was determining exactly how many flappers of exactly how many colors, and where exactly they'd go. While the grid studies were indispensably helpful in getting a very good sense of all this, irregularities inherent to the hand painted grid studies were not a reliable source for the exacting information required to begin manufacturing.
The culmination of this process included comparing photos of the paintings to photos of the grid studies, and then digitally filling in dots that represented correctly corresponding flapper colors. 111,692 flappers, one dot per flapper. By hand, in Photoshop. Do you know that scene in Baby Boom when Diane Keaton has a melt down and just wants the water to work, without knowing or caring where it comes from? That's very much how I felt about the scratch disks.
INSTALLATION
The first time I was able to drop in to see the beginnings of the project installation, I squealed. There were (literally) so many moving parts to this project, and over such a span of years – to see the end result looking like I had hoped and imagined was pure delight. The UNDULATING!! The SHIMMERING!!! I'm not a big selfie person, but I was so excited to see it finally coming together that I made my husband take one with me to show our kids and my parents (and now you!).
Pallets of gloriously organized 8-by-8-inch extruded aluminum flapper panels, each a pitch perfect color match, on site and ready for installation. Seeing them assembled and laid out like this reminded me of cracking opening a Crayola 64 back in the day, or standing in front of the glass bottles of powdered pigments at Sennelier. Limitless potential for play and beauty.
The completed south façade. Flappers installed, swinging, shining, shimmering, waving. Though the base palette is 35 colors, the iterations of hue experienced by the viewer are exponential. Each panel shifts color constantly throughout the day, reflecting the ever changing conditions of sun and wind.
Image courtesy EXTECH
111,692 flaps. 35 colors. Two 250 foot long sides, and two 500 foot long sides. Dozens and dozens and dozens more of studies and paintings. Five-ish years. One super duper fun project!
If you're ever up in the Bay Area near Mountain View, CA, the structure is open to the public. If you stop by, take pix and show me! #InexhaustibleBlooms