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: 10am-3pm Seasons: All Year
TechnicalDetails
Building Orientation: South facing
Solar Access: Two story, entry lobby windows Locations and # of prisms installed: 3 prisms in lobby windows
Some notes on how I made this.
In the fall of 2023, I was hospitalized twice for the first major illnesses in my 83 years. A septic UTI infection, abated by my Stage 4 Prostate Cancer, and later, a very painful vertebral infection from the same bacteria that buried deep into my spine. All this was only a couple of weeks after my Spirit Guides had unveiled 100 Libraries to me in August.
At the time, Chet Johnson, MD, lived next door to me at CoHo Ecovillage in Corvallis. And, Chet is no ordinary doctor. He is a retired, heavy-hitter developmental pediatrics researcher, professor, manager, and clinician. When I got out of the hospital, he volunteered to steer me through the medical maze I was facing, and go to all my doctors visits with me – Urologists, infectious disease docs, and two Cancer MDs. Money can’t buy this kind of help, but friendship did.
We quickly became deeply connected, and he gradually became my scouting collaborator for the 100 Libraries Project.
So anyway, it was a rainy February 24, 2024, with Chet at the wheel, when we pulled into the Fern Ridge Library parking lot in Veneta – the town that hosts the famed Oregon Country Fair. PHOTO Stepping of the car we saw a plain building with a beautiful, due south, arched window in the Children’s Area.
“Yeah! this looks like a good one!” The window was another energy efficient, solar design with a curved shelf below it, to block the sun. I eventually leveraged that curved interior shelf to create the entire installation.
Though arriving unannounced, we were met by the ebullient Pied Piper of Veneta, Youth Librarian Nicole McLaws. Nicole instantly became a great asset for the 100 Library‘s project, doing a great film interview and staging a packed, blast of an Opening Celebration on August 7.
After scoping, photographing, measuring and having a superb lunch at “Our Daily Bread” we returned home and I built a 1/2” scale model of the arched window end of the library. A couple of weeks later Chet drove us back to the library, where we did a full size mock up the model prism design, only to discover that even though it looked beautiful in the winter and the spectrum went 100 feet down the library – all the way to the circulation desk – it still didn’t work in the summer.
My next design used reflective prisms I had installed in the 15th century church of San Lucia de Ocon, in Spain. We did another on site mock, positioning the prisms on the interior bowed shade shelf and reflected spectrum to the ceiling. But I was disappointed in the luminescence and power of the spectrum as it spread out a lot wider and fainter than the transmission prisms that I used elsewhere.
Fern Ridge is another library (like Jefferson and Silverton) where a building designed to shade the high, and hot, summer sun angles made it super difficult to project noon spectrum into the Library from May through July. In Veneta, solving the problem of “the shadow created by a tiny, 3 inch window overhang,” eventually led to a nice creative breakthrough in my art making.
In my third try at success, I built a huge model in the studio and, as usual in cloudy Oregon, beamed my artificial sun on it. (PHOTOS / VID) I kept the big bow of arched window prisms, (even though they were shaded on summer noons, producing no spectrum), and modeled an 8’ long and 3’ wide, invisible, acrylic mirror for the shelf. To get more spectrum in the summer I inserted multidirectional prism “bricks” into the frosted lower part of the arched glass. Refracting every possible angle of the high sun, I designed the bricks at wildly divergent angles, bouncing rainbows like fairy dust onto the ceiling through the entire solar year. (I was having a ball playing in the Children’s Area.)
That finally worked to reflect the super high summer sun into tiny crystals of rainbow fairy dust light strewn across the ceiling. (See footage of the Veneta opening in the 100 Libraries film.. (PHOTOS) Summer’s 6” fairy dust sparks spread to 60 foot long rainbow flames licking the entire ceiling from November thru February. So after 5 full scale mock-up trips to the site – with kids playing all around us – behind our work perimeter of “caution tape” I had a design!
So finally, late in July, my first 100 Libraries studio assistant, Andrew Raush and I, fabricated the full size mirror shelf and curved prism window in the studio. I was half naked because the temperature was 104. (video) As you can see in our film, Michael got great footage of the model in the studio and opening party in Veneta. At the end of Nicole‘s interview there’s a flaming tilt up that shows the spectrum at noon February.
As I’ve described, Veneta was created in many, complex, in-studio and on-site design iterations: traveling eight times between studio models and on site, full scale mock-ups over six months. (A great advantage of having this library only an hour from home!)
And, all the while, the entire Fern Ridge Library staff was so accommodating of our coming in, setting up our yellow “caution” tape, and messing around with our mirrors, foam board and prisms, in the busy Children’s section.
This is another library where building a feature that shades high summer sun angles (as in Jefferson, and Silverton) made it super difficult to project noon spectrum into the space from May through July. In Veneta, solving the problem of a shadow created by a tiny, 3 inch window overhang, eventually created a path to the completed design!
As always, it’s my delight – and painful challenge – to squeeze every spectrum beam out of a site. The shading problems I had to solve at Veneta have expanded my art making ability to another level.
The result is that Fern Ridge Library has been the most time consuming, technically demanding, creative and hardware complex of the first seven 100 Libraries installations.
