June 11, 2007

Concrete Art

Jumping trout part of public art display

Suzanne Zwarun

Correspondent

Calgary

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, as the old song goes. But who would expect fish to be swimming alongside Calgary’s largest corridor of concrete?

The first of 144 concrete trout that make up the public art component of the $110 million Glenmore/Elbow/5th Street S.W. interchange were installed this fall. The GE5, as the interchange construction project is called, is the largest transportation project in the City of Calgary’s history, according to Mayor Dave Bronconnier.

The trout, an installation called Jumping Trout, are just as big. City officials deem the work to be “the biggest project, in terms of scope, to be undertaken through the Public Art Program to date”. It is also the first time the city commissioned artists solely to design the work and consult while Transportation Infrastructure retained responsibility for the fabrication and installation of the concrete trout on more concrete, the retaining walls lining Glenmore Trail, the primary east-west route in Calgary south of downtown.

Jumping Trout is a repeating pattern of swimming and jumping fish, created in relief cast concrete and bolted in a pattern along a concrete wave. Lafarge, which cast the trout, created them from its integrally pigmented Ductal (trademarked) concrete, an exceptionally thin, lightweight but highly durable material.

Jumping Trout has taken Violet Costello a long way from popcorn and paper mache, among her previously favoured materials for the award-winning interior installation works she has exhibited across Canada.

“It’s incredibly satisfying to work in concrete. I love it. It’s a really cool material,” says Costello. She and partner Bob Thomasson beat out a couple of dozen other artists to win the $46,000 commission for the GE5 art. Now that she’s worked with concrete for the first time, she hopes to do more. “This project opened up lots of ideas for future work.”

Known for her gargantuan sculptures involving perishable materials, Costello was resigned to the fleeting nature of her work until the GE5 project caught her attention. She liked the thought of its permanence – “work that could go outside and didn’t get thrown away.”

The city’s competition criteria emphasized durability and low maintenance – it’s hard to expect a housekeeper to dust artwork 10 feet above the surface of a freeway. Some proposals used galvanized steel but most opted for concrete.

Costello’s winning design features fish that are 15 feet long and up to seven feet wide in brown and rainbow trout, two species found in the Bow River. The upper fish are brightly coloured to create the illusion of leaping in the sunshine; the fish below the wave are more muted to suggest being in water.

"It's incredibly satisfying to work in concrete. I love it. It's a really cool material. This project opened up a lot of ideas for future work."

Violet Costello

Artist

The colour was a wonderful Lafarge surprise for the artist who envisioned the fish. “I never thought we could afford coloured concrete but Lafarge could mix the pigment right into their Ductal. And it was Lafarge that suggested mounting the fish on top instead of in panels. That way the whole fish is one unit rather than being cut into three separate units.”

That partnership makes the project what the city calls a case study in “successful cross discipline co-operation and collaboration”. As well as the artists, Lafarge North America and two city departments, Graham Construction, Stantec Consulting and Laser Spec., which made the fish forms for Lafarge, were involved in the project.

The driver behind the art is the city policy to spend one per cent of a project’s total cost on public art, says Jon Halford, area manager, City of Calgary Transportation Infrastructure. But no where else in Calgary is there a stretch of freeway with as much concrete wall and the GE5 project needed something “to enhance the aesthetics of the corridor”.

Halford says the corridor features 13,000 square metres of mechanically stabilized earth walls (MSE). Lafarge started casting panels in the summer of 2005, and the company will be still casting panels next spring. As well as the high performance concrete for retaining walls, four bridges, three vehicular and one pedestrian, are also made of concrete.

The GE5 is a star in a city where almost every infrastructure project is behind time and over budget. Just past the halfway point, it is on budget and on time for completion in the fall of 2007. Ian Norris, the city’s director of Transportation Infrastructure, attributes that to timing. “We tendered this program in late 2004, which was before we saw a lot of cost increases. Contractors were pretty hungry at that stage.”

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