Bono spray-painted<\/a> \u201cRock \u2019n\u2019 Roll Stops the Traffic\u201d on the fountain, which was completed in 1971, during a free U2 concert in 1987; the sculpture\u2019s steps and ledges made it a skateboarding mecca in the 1990s.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s weird and unusual,\u201d said Ted Barrow, a skateboarder and art historian. \u201cIt\u2019s a symbol of San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armand Vaillancourt, 96, said in a video interview from his Montreal studio that his most famous work belongs to the people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people love it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s been neglected but it\u2019s still alive.\u201d He called himself a joyous man who continues to create but added, \u201cI\u2019m very badly hurt.\u201d His long white hair gave him the look of a prophet as he warned, \u201cIt\u2019s going to be the shame of the city of San Francisco if they demolish it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the fountain\u2019s prime, people wended their way into the 710-ton sculpture whose water drowned out noise from the double-decker freeway that wrapped behind it. Two years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the damaged freeway was removed, exposing the fountain and stripping some of its meaning.<\/p>\n
Today, padel courts are shoved against the fenced-off fountain, which no longer spews water in Embarcadero Plaza. One side of the fountain has become a small gathering place for people with shopping carts who have nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n
The fountain, on the northeastern edge of the city at the foot of Market Street, sits near the sparkling Bay where ferry boats carry passengers to Sausalito, Angel Island and beyond. Every Saturday, thousands of shoppers descend on the Ferry Building, drawn to the kaleidoscopic farmers\u2019 market for black Mission figs, lemon verbena, Lion\u2019s mane mushrooms and other Bay Area essentials.<\/p>\n
At noon on a beautiful Saturday in late September, there was no one near the fountain, not even the people with no place else to go.<\/p>\n
San Francisco has proposed a $35 million renovation of the plaza in a public-private partnership. The city\u2019s Recreation and Park Department asked its Arts Commission in August for permission to deaccession the fountain, calling it \u201ca design constraint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recent city-sponsored reports determined that the fountain\u2019s mechanical and electrical systems have failed, and that it is a seismic risk with hazardous materials and is not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The fountain is technically not beyond repair, the reports said, for the cost of $28,951,519.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the water was flowing, I thought it was really cool,\u201d said Kat Anderson, the president of the department\u2019s seven-member commission. \u201cBut it was designed to be a fountain and it\u2019s not a fountain anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the late 1960s, city officials held a design competition for the fountain that was won by Vaillancourt, a well-known Canadian sculptor. Over his 74-year career, he has crafted pieces from metal, wood and concrete that are in museums and public spaces throughout Quebec. Although his San Francisco fountain is included in \u201cAtlas of Brutalist Architecture,\u201d he said in the interview that he \u201cdidn\u2019t know about Brutalist and all that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fate of the Vaillancourt Fountain raises questions about unpopular public art.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a masterpiece, but it captures a moment so distinctly and with such verve,\u201d said John King, a former architecture critic at The Chronicle and the author of \u201cPortal: San Francisco\u2019s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of urban America\u2019s truly bizarre works of public art\u201d and \u201ca reminder of midcentury mistakes,\u201d he said. Those are precisely the reasons he wants to save the fountain. In the 1960s, architects and city planners believed that grand spaces could be catalysts for people to gather, King said, but often \u201cthose spaces turned out to be voids.\u201d<\/p>\n
At an Arts Commission meeting this month, speakers were almost evenly divided about the fountain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat may appear to some as an odd sculpture speaks directly to anyone who ever felt like they didn\u2019t fit in and why they make San Francisco their home,\u201d said Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, which works to preserve modern architecture.<\/p>\n
The next speaker called it \u201can eyesore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Julian Lake, an executive with Bay Area Council, which represents major employers working to improve the Bay Area, said he walked by the fountain every day and thought it had passed its time. \u201cIt can be replaced by something equally weird but inspiring,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In an interview, Charles Birnbaum, the chief executive of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, blamed the city for the plight of the fountain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking at more than a decade of deferred maintenance and also a complete lack of programming,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople don\u2019t feel welcome.\u201d The message, he said, is that the city does not care.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t neglect,\u201d said Tamara Aparton, a spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department. \u201cIt was an aging, unsafe system that simply couldn\u2019t be maintained anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vaillancourt learned about the threat to his fountain from his children in April after they read the news on their phones. \u201cWe were shocked the city never tried to reach my father,\u201d said his 33-year-old son, Alexis Vaillancourt, who is also a sculptor.<\/p>\n
In May, the Vaillancourts traveled to meet with city officials, accompanied by representatives from Quebec and the Canadian embassy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were polite,\u201d Alexis Vaillancourt said. \u201cOur feeling was that they wanted to demolish the sculpture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Public fountains are sometimes dismantled or relocated when \u201cpeople with power think that they\u2019re ugly or offensive,\u201d said Michele Bogart, an emeritus professor of art history at Stony Brook University and an expert on public art.<\/p>\n
In August, a lawyer for Armand Vaillancourt sent San Francisco a cease-and-desist letter, warning that any effort to destroy the fountain would violate Vaillancourt\u2019s \u201cmoral rights.\u201d But once an artwork becomes part of a city collection, Bogart said, the artist has little to no control over the work.<\/p>\n
While the city\u2019s Arts Commission prepares to vote on the future of the fountain, Vaillancourt is still designing, at work now on his diamond-shaped black granite tombstone.<\/p>\n
The fountain should outlast him, he thinks. \u201cShe\u2019s very young,\u201d the artist said. \u201cIt should be good for a few hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Vaillancourt Fountain, a tangled web of concrete tubing that once belched 30,000 gallons of water a minute…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[51997,2273,307,304,305,306,308,93,51998,61,60,51999,3023,51996],"class_list":["post-79667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-armand-1929","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-fountains","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-san-francisco-calif","tag-sculpture","tag-vaillancourt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}