Along the idyllic eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, and nestled between Codornices and Cerrito Creeks, you’ll find Albany, California. A small hamlet with a penchant for renegade and exuberant behaviors. It all started in 1908 when two civilized women armed with shotguns protested the dumping of trash in their community by the neighboring City of Berkeley. Shortly thereafter, town folk voted to incorporate and form what we know of today as Albany, California.
Fast forward nearly one hundred years from its founding, the City of Albany released a Call for Artists to engage their beloved Ohlone Greenway. Groundworks Office found no better time to stir up its own renegade spirit and adroitly deploy an interactive play sculpture. The call for artists was to, “create a work of art that is related to and in response to the local environment, including the possibility of interactivity for all Ohlone Greenway users to enjoy. The art play sculpture will invite children to the Ohlone Greenway and encourage positive interaction for children and adults.” These high-minded goals were met squarely head-on with the hard realities of a $40,000 budget.
The chosen location for the public art was a verdant stretch of lawn that cowered beneath the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s hulking elevated tracks. This urban remnant, named the Ohlone Greenway, was created when Albany voters declined to pay for the undergrounding of the tracks during the construction of the system in 1964. The result of that decision, albeit one of complete and total happenstance, was the creation a vibrant, multi-use, ecologically rich, urban linear park.
The solution here was going to need a serious helping of moxie and creative might.
And so, in a fit of creative exuberance Albany Loop was created. The Loop is fun and interactive, visually exuberant and spatially dynamic. Looping across the site, a 12” diameter, high strength steel pipe, reshapes the homogenous tract of green lawn along the Ohlone Greenway, into a fun and playful space. At its crescendo, it loops to spell ALBANY, in an audaciously graphical and energetic statement. The size and scale of Albany Loop were thoughtfully considered, and intended to be a strong visual landmark, for not only those riding, walking, or scooting along the greenway, but for those passing above. Multiple ways of sitting, relaxing, and resting are encouraged here.
Albany Loop is also a reinvention of the “Welcome-to-[insert city here]” landmark we are so often familiar with. Here, pipes bend in a quiet spectacle, and, where it counts, it shouts “WELCOME TO ALBANY!”
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