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Covering almost an acre and a half,
this artwork is the largest piece of public art in the Pittsburgh
area. When the original flooring at Pittsburgh International
Airport needed to be replaced the Airport Authority decided to
commission an artist to design the new one. So... instead of your
average, bland, tile flooring we now have approx 69,000 sq feet of
functional art!
I was fortunate to attend an art tour of the airport where Mr Merrell
gave a talk about this project and the process involved. Most of
this is written from notes I took during that talk, and observations
made while I explored the installation.
The design incorporates five
silhouetted images of local neighborhoods with landmarks. The artist
included places that would be readily recognized: The Carrie Furnaces
, Monongahela Incline, Smithfield St Bridge, the sports stadiums,
Cathedral of Learning, Phipp's Greenhouse. Those silhouettes are
positioned at the perimeter (by the entrances to the different
concourses and the food court). A blue sky with scattered clouds
takes up the bulk of the scene. Contrails zig and zag across the
floor connecting different areas of the terminal. Several aircraft
silhouettes are inlaid along the flight paths, adding interest to the
scene. Looking down on the terrazzo flooring from the second floor
gives you a sense of the overall design, although you still can't see
the entire mural. It's a good place to watch people staring and
interacting with the design.
Clayton Merrell has done a lot of
paintings with the sky as the subject. Many were done from the
perspective of someone lying on the ground looking up, with elements
of the horizon at the perimeter of the canvas. Until
The Sky
Beneath Our Feet, his largest
painted had been 8 x 10 feet. Extrapolating his vision to a canvas
of this size required several steps.
The project started
in the Spring of 2013 when Clayton Merrell was one of the three
artists (out of an initial group of 10 artists) selected to pitch
their ideas. His previous work was well suited to this venue, and
his proposal incorporated all of the elements he liked to use - such
as movement, or indications of time passing. He was fond of
depicting wide open spaces framed by detail, and incorporating light,
weather and astronomical events. His previous work also used lines
or trajectories and he liked to explore the way these elements
represent connectivity.
Clayton Merrell
explained how the arching flight paths were a reflection of the
architectural lines of the terminal building and helped to tie the
artwork to the structure. They also connect destinations within the
terminal, flowing between shops and concourses.
To come up with the
details for the horizon, the artist spent time around the city
photographing landmarks and neighborhoods. He pieced the photos
together, made a digital trace of the image and converted it to a
vector image before coloring it in.
The finished floor
has only 13 different colors, but fine tuning those colors took a lot
of trial and error. Terrazzo flooring has been used for centuries
and these days includes several different materials (glass, granite,
quartz and marble). Adjusting the amounts/ratios of those materials
changes the floor's appearance and coloring.
After creating the design, local
architects (LGA Partners) worked with the artist before the plan was
turned over to the installation team (Mosites Construction and Roman
Mosaic and Tile Company). They were able to place the design into a
3D model of the terminal to preview how it would look in place. The
design had to be printed out full size to check for problems. To
transfer the design to the floor, a stencil had to be created which
was used to paint the outlines. Each color in the flooring is
contained by a zinc border. Each piece of zinc was hand bent and
then epoxied to the floor. Once one color was poured it had to set up
for 24 hours before an adjacent color could be poured. During the
process, the airport had to remain operational, so the flooring was
done one section at a time in a long, slow process. Most of the
troweling was done by hand and the terrazzo had to be polished with
increasingly finer grit until smooth and then sealed and polished to
a high shine. It took almost two years to complete the installation.
Within the design are several aircraft
including the space shuttle, the Wright brothers' first plane, and a
blimp. The details for these aircraft were too small to shape with
the zinc strips, so instead they were made of aluminum and precisely
cut with a water jet.
Something that worried the artist from
the start was how the Alexander Calder mobile
Pittsburgh would
display above the new flooring. The mobile is designed to move with
the air currents and Mr Merrell did not want the floor to detract
from the mobile. In the end the floor design complements the mobile
very well. Although the design of the floor sounds busy in a written
description, in reality the clouds, contrails, aircraft and
silhouettes are well spaced apart and subtle. If I hadn't been told
that there were 13 different colors in the flooring I would have
guessed that there were only four or five. The artist said that with
the changes in lighting, shadows and reflections that it seems like
there are actually more colors. It does reflect every light and sign
so I can see his point. I would expect that it could look different
at different times of day and depending on the volume of people
walking across it at any given time.
In the food court the design is a little bit different. One of the
other ideas Mr Merrell had for the floor was a topographical map of the
area, and he decided to make use of that idea within the food court.
Terrazzo flooring is very durable and
when cement-based it should last longer than the building.
The other interesting result of the new
floor is how the people interact with it. Kids of all ages follow
the lines and explore the designs. Adults stop to stare, admire, and
try to identify different landmarks. It's a beautiful way to
introduce visitors to Pittsburgh, and a much quieter one without the
loud click-clacks of luggage wheels across grout strips.
