Client: Crescent Heights

Overview

Promised Land, a 3,500 square foot public art plaza, is comprised of cartographic layers of maps reflecting the exact location of the site in graded finishes of granite reflecting a scaled map 1:42 of San Francisco, bisected by intersecting granite trapezoids. One is etched with topographic lines indicating the California Coast and the other is etched with the watercourses of the Sacramento River which flows into the Richmond Bay surrounding San Francisco. The confluence of these two trapezoidal maps is the reason the ground upon which Promised Land is located in the city of San Francisco as we know it.

Goals

In San Francisco @ 10th Market, where three major streets intersect in ‘Twitter Land’, as we are fond of calling it, where the intersection of the start-up culture and the SRO/marijuana dispensary culture meet, is Promised Land. Our studio champions public art as a capital cultural and spiritual investment. Our investiture of public art as both an aesthetic and social urban amenity is evidenced in the integration of multiple platforms of medium upon which, and through which, the public is offered a multitude of experiences both random and choreographed meanings and metaphors.

Process

Handel Architects with developers Crescent Heights, selected Delaney Chin to develop and build a public art installation extending the internal residential suites in balance with formal sculptural definitions of a major thoroughfare- Market Street. As a multidisciplinary studio of professional artists, horticulturists, architects and engineers, our partnership with Glen Rescalvo, director of Handel, engaged our mutual beneficial talents to create a suite of distinctly crafted sculptural compositions reflecting our united desire to effect sequential experiences of spectacular nature evidenced in the granite monoliths in balance with the intimate details of crafted construction vessels within which grow exquisite manicured horticultural bonsai forms.