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Earthworks Designated Historic Landmark
In Sepetember of last year, in Bayer Necessities, Adam posted a story The Seattle Times ran about the upcoming 25th year anniversary of Herbert Bayer's Mill Creek Canyon Earthwork in Kent, Washington, which is part dam and part public art work for the city of Kent. This work, installed to mitigate floods, for bench marks that are a quarter of a century old was just recently designated an historic landmark.
What follows is the press release.
Remarkable Public Art Work designated as Historic Landmark
KENT, WA – April 28, 2008 – Formal recognition of historic properties through landmark designation is typically confined to sites that are at least 40 years old or older – and rarely is a property found to be of such exceptional significance that the age criterion is waived. But such was the case on April 24, 2008 when the King County Landmarks Commission, acting for the City of Kent, designated the Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks as a City of Kent Landmark. Nominated by the Kent Arts Commission, the Earthworks is the City’s first designated landmark.
The Earthworks was designed by renowned Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer and installed in 1982. It is a sculpted landscape intended to address flooding, erosion, and to detain stormwater. It is also a city park.
In an emotionally charged hearing before the Landmarks Commission, artists, historians, landscape architects, elected officials, and others spoke to the power of place embodied in the site. They also spoke of the precedent it set for integrating art directly into large-scale environmental projects, and the remarkable interdisciplinary effort that was required to pull it off.
Designation comes at a time when the site is threatened by environmental factors related to fisheries, vegetation and stormwater. The Washington State Department of Ecology has increased the dam’s spillway requirement from a 100-year storm to a 10,000 year storm. As a result, the height of the earthen berm that protects historic downtown Kent will be increased by two feet in summer 2008, so as to provide a new spillway through the adjacent parking lot. The existing outlet structure will also be altered to accommodate increased stormwater. The additional spillway and capacity are intended to prevent catastrophic flooding.
Concurrently, fishery requirements along the Mill Creek riparian corridor have made it difficult to maintain the Earthworks in the pristine manner that Herbert Bayer envisioned. Restoration requires extensive hand grubbing of invasive and volunteer vegetation on an ongoing basis. Now that the property is designated, the Kent Arts Commission will move forward with developing a management plan to resolve these complex maintenance issues.
The Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks was commissioned by the Kent Arts Commission as part of the larger Earthworks: Land Reclamation Sculpture symposium organized by the King County Arts Commission in 1979.
Additional information is available at www.KentArts.org.
Photo Credits: John Hoge, 1982