A project I’m working on right now is called “Collection Point.” It’s a pretty major project in Northeast Minneapolis, a permanent piece of public art. It’s for the City of Minneapolis, for the Public Works Department.  It’s for a new building–the building is a storage and maintenance facility for snow plows, street sweepers, recycling trucks… it’s a huge facility.  The basic idea–one of the ideas–is I wanted to use a found object. I wanted to take something that already existed and kind of transform it.  So I thought, where do we interface with the city for trash and recycling and compost? We go out to the alley and we put stuff in the right bin and we actually touch these bins–we open the lids, we put in the organics or recycling or whatever, and there it is.  And then at some point in the week, the city workers come and they handle the same bin, the same container, and that is kind of this touchpoint where we connect, but you never really see that, you just expect it to happen.

And so I got interested in the lids themselves.  If you look at these molded plastic lids, they’re interesting. They look like a form for concrete. So the idea was to use one of these recycling lids–a typical Minneapolis-issue recycling lid–as a form for concrete, and then to make many of these, like a hundred of them, and use them in this sculpture, these cast pieces of concrete. 

It was very challenging to do that. You don’t just take the lid and pour some concrete and call it a day. These are all going to be up in the air–they’re suspended on steel frames so it’s like 30 feet tall. So there are some safety issues and engineering big-time issues! Nobody really has done this before, myself included, the city, nobody.  So we’ve all been very careful to make sure that these are structurally sound, that the reinforcing in them is adequate, that their attachment is adequate, that the concrete mix is right… so we made a mock-up of one, and we sent it to an independent testing lab where they do all kinds of tests, analyze, x-ray it, count air bubbles, look at the mixture, put it on a machine that performs a fatigue test so a certain amount of force is applied to it in cycles.  And that’s the big one that it needed to pass. So it was on a machine, basically, that applied this 100-pound force to it a lot of times. Something like 100,000 times, which took about a week and a half of 24/7 fatigue testing. So anyway, it passed, which is really good, because if it didn’t pass, the backup plan didn’t exist. I had no backup plan!

From a structural standpoint, the guy that I talked to about it–and these are structural academic PhD types in engineering, and he said–the 100,000 cycles was conservative, very conservative–because no one knew what number of cycles to test this at, so they just picked a high one.  And he said he’d feel good 50 years from the time it’s put up, he’d have no problem going under there and feeling safe. That’s a long time. Of course that test is somewhat isolated, in a vacuum. It’s not the real world, but it’s a good indicator, I think.

[Next week: What will Collection Point actually look like?]

collection point, in progress, Minneapolis, public art