Public Art and Architecture

Full confession...I took this yesterday when we were on the way home from Cafe Frida.We were both quite taken with this mural which covers the entire entrance wall of the Aleworks. It definitely adds some color to a part of town near the City Hall which is an example of brutalist architecture worthy of Soviet Russia. It was voted the ugliest building in town in a poll taken by the local newspaper, the Press Democrat. The Santa Rosa Creek was put underground and a lot of nice Craftsman style bungalows were torn down to make way for several civic buildings and the equally hideous downtown mall. The central plaza was recently redesigned and it too, is a masterpiece of unwelcoming mediocrity.

There was a move to move a bunch of administrative buildings from another part of town to new quarters in the property at one end of the mall now occupied by a vacant Sears building. The city fathers may not have learned their lesson, but their constituents have and raised a cry of outrage at both the proposal and its outrageous cost, and whole idea seems to have the gone the way of many other ill-conceived ideas.

The citizens of Petaluma are busy fighting an 'outdoor art installation' of bathtubs on stilts at different angles poised over a riverside walkway which is being rescued from squalid obscurity behind restaurants on the main drag, and turned into a nice area of cafes and  dining areas. The Petaluma River was once a thriving waterway connecting farming and light industrial enterprises to the bay. With the decline of local rail lines and shipping, it has become a silted up backwater. If the dredging and development is successful, it will be a really pleasant part of town, but I can't imagine how this can possibly be enhanced by a bunch of bathtubs precariously perched over it.

It seems that public art has to be controversial to be considered....and perhaps I am just unenlightened, but I don't think the bathtubs on stilts, called 'A Fine Balance' are a big hit. A lot of people have suggested that fixing the potholes in the crumbling streets would be a better use of the $150,000.