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Announcement: Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1998, San Francisco Municipal Metro East Light Rail Maintenance and Operations Facility is finally completed. The project "Blueprints" consists of two curtain walls, each 36 feet high and 19 feet wide. They are the exterior of two stair towers, with each curtain wall comprised of 21 individual insulated glass units, with two laminated tinted blue glass panels on the interior and two clear glass panels on the exterior laminated with a white line mechanical engineering drawing - one blueprint is 100 years old, and the other is 50 years old - extended over the entire surface of each curtain wall.
Grand Opening was held on Wednesday September 17th, 2008. Congressperson Nancy Pelosi, and the Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom attended the Grand Opening.
Designed by Nobuho (Nobi) Nagasawa, Anita Margrill, architect
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Artist Statement
My work ranges from site-specific projects to installations and public art. I create an interactive space that is informed by the actual place -- its history, people and spatial narrative. This approach requires detective-like investigation and quasi-archeological research, exploring sociological and psychological aspects of each site. Immediate physical and social context influences the form, content, and choice of materials and media.
I see my artist’s identity as inevitably “hybrid” – in my case, part sculptor, journalist, poet, architect, and urban designer. Materials and methodology follow upon the necessary diversity of evolving concepts as a project reveals its conditions. I see this process as an excavation of meanings – cultural, geopolitical, social, personal – that lie hidden within the materials themselves. By revealing personal memories, collective histories, unacknowledged myths, and contradictory issues, I try to open up key social and personal reserves that can galvanize public interaction. Art, after all, has the power to deconstruct the blockages of social energy and serve as a catalyst to new vision and public self-discovery. My goal is to create artwork that provokes and revives a site and wakes people up to the poetry of place.
I am intrigued by the sense of scale, both human and civic, and how relatively small change can enhance private experience within the public setting. A truly livable space should stand the test of time. It spurs social communication and inspires reconstruction. When history is brought to the surface through public art, it can serve as source for the renewal of cultural identity and the evolution of social values.
My goal is to create works that attract people to possibility where and as they live.
The development and realization of art in public is a dialogue with a place and its time – land and substance, its past, its people, the future they create – made new, immediate, and somehow timeless.
Nobuho Nagasawa
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