Work of art, work of Earth

Twenty-five years ago, in the younger, bolder days of Washington's public-art programs, the mayor of a small city south of Seattle latched onto a grand vision for a public-works project. The engineering need was straightforward: a dam that would prevent stormwaters from deluging the city.

But the local arts commission and city administrators saw the potential for something much greater, a place that would stand on its own as a work of art and a public park, transforming an eroded thicket into a source of civic pride. They ushered the plan through with grass-roots support and community activism.

The town was Kent, the mayor was Isabel Hogan, and the project is the 1982 Mill Creek Canyon Earthwork, designed by leading modernist and former Bauhaus member Herbert Bayer.

The sculpted geometry of Bayer's 2 ½-acre earthwork project has been a success story for Kent, appreciated by the community and admired by international art and design afficionados. Yet as Kent officials prepare to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the city's innovative Earthwork, they are also puzzling over how to keep it intact. The issues they're facing echo concerns about other aging public artworks throughout the state. When many projects were commissioned, little planning was in place to consider their longterm care and changing circumstances.

Multifaceted feature

Sure, the Mill Creek Canyon Earthwork fulfills its job of containing stormwater from the creek: Last year during the wettest month on record, the Earthwork helped protect downtown Kent from rising floodwaters. And beyond that essential function, the artwork is a thing of beauty, ingeniously designed and laid out as the focal point of a 100-acre park. Bayer's graceful design includes a long retention berm; various mounds, a pond within a ring-shaped mound, and a channel, all interspersed with viewing areas and walkways along the stone-lined banks of Mill Creek. It provides a serene greenspace within the city, a place for public gatherings and private reverie.

In addition, Bayer's earthwork quickly became a landmark for cultural tourists as well as urban planners and ecologists looking for more effective and inspired public works solutions. The project is named in Amy Dempsey's recent book "Destination Art" with other renowned sites around the world.

Past circumstances

Saturday, the city of Kent will host a 25th anniversary party at the Mill Creek Canyon Earthwork, to celebrate the project and those who fostered its creation. Plans for the day include performances, an art exhibition at the site and a continuing exhibition at the Centennial Center Gallery that's a tribute to Bayer. Bayer's land sculpture was conceived as a part of "Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture," an early project of the King County Arts Commission, which also resulted in Robert Morris's untitled earthwork at an old gravel pit in Kent.

But since Bayer's project was conceived, the requirements for it have changed. The foremost question administrators face is how to ensure the future of the piece as it was designed. Bayer created the water-detention berm to meet the standard of the day, with the ability to weather flooding from a major storm (a so-called 100-year storm). Now, with our changing climate, such storms happen far more frequently and the State Department of Ecology has called for the level of flood protection to dramatically increase — a daunting requirement.

How to solve it when raising the level of the berm would seriously impair Beyer's sculptural design, the proportions and integrity of the artwork?

Ensuring the future

Kent's visual-arts coordinator, Cheryl dos Remedios, says the issues surrounding the Earthwork's future are complex. "One way to look at it is as a three-legged stool: artwork, storm-water dam and public park," she said. "If you look at it from a sculptural standpoint, you wouldn't take a master artwork and change it. But Bayer intended it as a functional stormwater dam. So, is there a way to meet the changed regulations without altering the artwork?"

Possibilities exist, according to students at the University of Washington School of Landscape Architecture Studio, who looked into the issues. They came up with a list of solutions that are now being considered, dos Remedios said.

Care for aesthetics

Then there's the issue of how to properly maintain the park's appearance. For years, the Mill Creek Earthwork has suffered from inadequate care under the Kent Parks system, which oversees it. Like many municipal parks departments, it has limited resources and the Earthwork requires more than mowing. With its location along a salmon stream comes restrictions about mowing and pruning. Workers are needed to clear by hand the thickets of blackberry vines and canary reed grass that have invaded the creekbanks, to unclog the gravel-lined channel and pond that are obscured by aggressive weeds. Who will be responsible for caring for the project in a way that maintains the elegant lines of the sculpture while protecting fragile wildlife habitat?

"It's a treasure," dos Remedios said last week at the site. "We have this green open space that runs through the most populated area of town. Had the dam been built in the traditional way, the benefit of public access would not have existed."

Another thing in the works, dos Remedios says, is proposing the Earthwork be added to the National Register of Historic Places, which would establish the work's importance and open up funding sources through grants. She also hopes to recruit a volunteer group to help with maintenance.

"It doesn't make sense to take out an artwork of that success to suit our current needs," she said. "We need to be very thoughtful ... . This is a landmark project. We should be doing this sort of infrastructure project all the time, recognizing that we can't hold art/infrastructure to museum standards. Things change. But whenever we have alternatives for preserving the original design, we should do so."

Sheila Farr:

sfarr@seattletimes.com