Pasadena – NanJing

Parking Structure Madison, 2nd Facade proposal, Pasadena, California, 2002

Christina Ulke with artist Linda Pollack and architect Claudia Reisenberger

The cement used in the structure has its origins in the earth and limestone of Nanjing China. It is quarried, crushed, then ground with silica and iron ore, then with clinker. After being processed into cement, it is loaded onto ships, routed 4,000 miles to San Pedro California, unloaded into holding tanks, filled into trucks of 2,728 ton capacity, driven to Irwindale, poured into 50 foot panels, trucked to Pasadena, and erected on Madison and Green.

As we seek to keep the façade uncovered, exposing the immediate materiality of the concrete, so are we proposing an art plan based on revealing. The project is based on a collection of stories, uncovered, translated into symbols, with explanations of history that is there but not always surfacing.

Providing the base and backdrop is the image of a mountain carved out, quarried, and terraced, as part of the process of being quarried for cement. This image comes from Nanjing. Formally, the terraced mountain image hints at the multi leveling of the parking garage, as cars ease their way to the top of the garage. The shape of the mountain, flattened over time of years of extraction, parallels the shape of the parking structure itself.

The stories we gathered are collected along the line of this relationship of Nanjing and Pasadena. While unique to this relation etched out from this specific transaction, they tell the larger story of the United States, immigration, globalization and American culture. - Ulke, Pollack, Reisenberger

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