Installed 2024 – 3 of 100
410 S Water St
Silverton, Oregon 97381
503-873-5173
Library Director: NAME
Email: info@silverfallslibrary.org
Notice how the time of day and seasons effect the rainbow beams as they glide thru the building, changing shape, color and position.
Ideal Viewing Times And Seasons
Times of Day:
Seasons:
Technical Details
Building Orientation:
(coming soon)
Solar Access:
(coming soon)
Some notes on how I made it
Silver Falls Library is one of my career masterpieces.
On February 1, 2024, Johanna, my Project Manager, entered Christy Davis’s, Silver Falls Library, through the low, dark hallway that suddenly puffs into a giant, thirty foot cube of space – with dreamy white walls all the way up.
High on the southeast and northwest walls are a row of four small windows.
I instantly grokked: This is a dream space for my art!
And, I didn’t make my usual foam board design model for Silver Falls till after the first prism installation in the east windows, months later. (Building a miniature spectral stage, though a delight, takes lots of time, and I thought I could bypass one here…. Whoops!)
Later, on July 1st, Chet Johnson, my scouting and installation buddy, drove us to Silverton to create the art. However, installing the flat, laser-cut prisms in those high, southeast windows that day, became a big disappointment for me. Up on the 24 foot lift, my heart sank when I discovered the building plans were not “as built” and the actual windows were 50% wider than on the drawings. The flat, laser-cut prisms I had made in the studio were now 50% too short! I sadly doubled up the prisms, now filling just two of the four windows – for 50% less rainbows…..
…..And, to make matters worse, a hidden roof gutter shadowed the windows in summer mid-day, so my prism’s rainbow beams had to be reflected from mirrors that I mounted on the high window sills, just to get any spectrum into the room around summer noon. (I later amplified this mirror solution in Fern Ridge to great advantage).
Finished installing and wiped out at 6:45 PM, I came down off the lift, glanced up and – Eureka! I saw sunlight streaming in from the opposite, high northwest windows. What a gift! I had always thought these were a “no go” for my prisms because they were way too far north. (8977.MOV) If we had finished earlier that day, or it was cloudy, I never would have created north half of this glorious, year round installation.
Like so many creative breakthroughs in 100 Libraries, when I curiously followed bread crumbs of failure in the south windows, my guides offered a quantum leap in the scope and impact of the artwork.
I rushed home, and, the next day, finally built a model of Christy’s atrium with all eight windows (see video) to physically explore the full scope of all its annual sun angles. video model here + ceiling tilt down video
These common “intuitive” accidents/mistakes (whisperings from the muse) happen often, reminding me that my frontal cortex does not run the show.
There are a number of creative “firsts” for me in Silver Falls:
• Bands of super pastel, flooding across the ceiling tiles from both north and south windows, and at opposite ends of the solar year! (pix)
• Thirty foot high, first, second and third order spectrum beams, (triple rainbows) fan the entire northeast wall, for more than an hour in late Summer afternoons – and mornings in Spring and fall. These living solar murals are totally site specific. If the building was rotated 15 degrees to the left or right, or the windows were in different locations, these iconic rainbow fans could not exist.
In addition to the atrium’s year round spectral beams, long, low and lazy rainbow beams also wash a south study nook, the West Reading Area, and Teen and Child ren’s Rooms in the afternoon. Christy even got a photo of rainbows outside the building!
