Vancouver Land Bridge
Scope and Contents
This series consists of material related to planning and construction of the public art installations including designs, site plans, correspondence, contracts, and financial records. There are also eleven oversize models of the sites.
Dates
- Creation: 2000-2013
Creator
- From the Collection: Confluence Project (Organization)
Conditions Governing Access
Collection is open for research. Series 3 and Series 5 contain unprocessed born-digital files on CDs, MiniDisks, Betacam SX, and VHS. Unprocessed content includes files from Confluence in the Schools, Confluence in the Classroom projects, recorded interviews, and footage from sites. For more information, please contact the Archives.
Historical Note
At Fort Vancouver, Washington, Maya Lin and Native American architect Johnpaul Jones reunited the Klickitat Trail with the banks of the Columbia in the form of a land-bridge over Interstate 5, one of the nation’s busiest north-south commercial highways. The bridge features indigenous plants, circular walkways, tribal ideograms and, most prominently, a view of the multilane highway and railroad tracks below. This bridge is in the shape of a halfmoon that curves out over the highway with different viewing points and plants that encourage visitors to linger rather than pass through. The bridge seeks to tell the complex history of this site, balancing the narrative of western progress with a more subtle discussion of the relationship between the river, the land, and the people that lived here before “progress.” On one side of the bridge there is is a canoe paddle gate by artist Lillian Pitt that welcomes visitors. As the bridge slopes upward there are a series of historical images of the site starting with the Hudson Bay Company, continuing through the massive shipyards of the World War II era, and ending with the “modernity” of the highway that the viewer is traversing. The project was completed between 2002 and 2008.
Extent
From the Series: 46.65 Linear Feet (10 boxes, 16 tubes, 11 oversize models)
Language of Materials
English
Repository Details
Part of the Whitman College and Northwest Archives Repository