As RVA works towards uniting Browns Island and Manchester with T.
As RVA works towards uniting Browns Island and Manchester with T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge, a Colorado based artist has submitted a proposal for a project on the Southside of the river at the base of the bridge.
The project, 10 17’ tall rings will be made out of 1’ x 1’ square core-ten tubing, will cover 1,100 feet and “will not require any maintenance” according to the artist.
“The key to my approach with this project is the idea to inspire a sense of wonder for how we can be in an exquisite relationship with our environment,” wrote Joshua Wiener, the CO artist who submitted the proposal. “I seek to extend the visionary planner’s accomplishments with art that poetically contributes to the connection of nature and civilization. So much of what I experienced here spoke to this.”
A detailed budget (below) and schedule was also included with the proposal, and the project comes in at an interestingly reasonable $200,000. I say reasonable because the Maggie Walker statue slated for downtown RVA is set to clock in close to 1 million… somehow.
It looks like the timeline would allow for as fast an installation as it is cheap, with fabrication and an unveiling both possible before the end of 2016 with committee approval.
Money for the project would come out of the city’s Public Arts Comission fund which is filled by skimming 1% off of capital improvement projects. The PAC found itself in control of about $3.2 million after big projects like the new city jail were completed. This money is reserved specifically for public art and cannot be reallocated.
RVAMag thinks the project looks pretty neat, however the use of the font Papyrus (top image), and possibly a comic-sans variant (image below) used in the footnotes, did lead to some concern in the office.
According to WebDesignDepot (and anyone with a modern design-based degree):
Papyrus is the king of bad fonts… As with Comic Sans, avoid this typeface if you want to be taken seriously. Unlike other reviled typefaces, though, Papyrus isn’t bad because it is overused: it’s bad because it just doesn’t look good. Kitschy, cheap and vile, Papyrus has no place in your designs.
It’s unfair for us to actually judge someone on this, but it is 2016, even dick font would have made a stronger visual impact.
Check out some other generated images of the project below via this presentation.
